I find it very frustrating that Will has gotten all wrapped up in furling things he should just be blogging, I think in part because with furl there is no implicit need to turn every page you’d like to bookmark into a mini-essay.
He was responding, in part, to Alan’s thread on what makes for real blogging, and to be honest, his comment kind of took me by surprise. Is he saying that everything we find interesting or relevant on the Web needs to be blogged? (If he had comments enabled I’d ask him directly on his site…) And that assumes, of course, that by blogged we mean mini-essayed. Which, of course, I think it should.
Although I have come to rely on this space as a place to react and link and archive ideas and thoughts, a blog doesn’t do what Furl does when it comes to saving a piece of the Web for later use. And frankly, there is a lot of stuff that I find interesting that I don’t find blog-worthy, especially in the context of the narrow focus of this space. Besides, Tom or anyone else can subscribe to my Furl feeds if they really didn’t want to miss anything.
Eventually, a tool will bring all of this together. Ken has a vision for a blog/wiki, and how hard would it be to throw an aggregator and a bookmarking software piece onto it?
Your comment makes me realize that I’ve been using unpublished pages of my weblog as a bookmarking feature, without the chance to share the closed contents with others.