Furl It!

I've been furling and bookmarking and social bookmarking and generally explorig the world of furl, delicious, and RSS feeds. Has this gotten me anywhere? Not yet. I've read some really interesting stuff. I've been thinking about the meaning of social bookmarking (to be explored furter in another post). But, generally, I still prefer to save articles as web archives on my hard drive in files that I create and organize according to my own eccentric heirarcical system.

There is a very good reason why this works so well for me. I live in rural Vermont where there is only dial up available at my house. For high-speed internet access, I go to the Spiral Press Cafe at the bookstore, spend $4 on coffee and get the password for the day. But there are many days when there is no internet access at all. This is (believe it or not) a reality for many people. windstorms, snowstorms, electrical failures, human failures. So, on those days, I have information on my hard drive to be read at leisure.

Yes, yes. It does sound old fashioned. But I like it. It works for me. I will continue to explore the world of furl, delicious, RSS feeds and lots of new sites that are showing up to help me wade through the slog of information available on any given subject at any given moment. However, I don't find it a slog. I don't find it a chore or an inconvenience to organize my own information. It actually gives me an opportunity to think about the content - sort of like hand writing. What is a chore, is having to learn a new system, software, procedure, etc. when all I want to do is read an article. If I have to do all that everytime I want to read an article, I probably won't bother - unless it's really important.