What's Better Than Bookmarking Your Favorite Web Sites

A lot of new and interesting web sites and pages come to my attention every week. They arrive by phone, email, voice mail, radio, TV, and newspaper, just to name a few sources. I used to clip articles, flag pages, write myself notes and then try to file everything in some organized way, so I'd be able to find it when I needed it.

When I began spending a lot of time on the Internet, I learned how to bookmark various sites and add them to my FAVORITES list, using my browser to keep the files organized. That system was great, but it was only available when I was at the computer that I originally used to capture the link.

So when I worked on my laptop instead of my desktop or I was at a client location, I lost access to all that information. And when the desktop computer died.....well, it wasn't pretty.

I found a great solution about four years ago that I still use today.

Furl (www.furl.net) is a social bookmarking site that allows you to store, organize, search, and manage your favorite web pages. You can make notes about them, rate them (one to five stars), categorize them in whatever ways are useful to you, and even share them if you like. Since I'm not particularly interested in the social aspects of the site, I mark all my links as private, which means that I'm the only who can search them.

You can give each web site that you've saved a name that will help you to recognize and find it. For example, when I furled the site http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65, I figured that I wouldn't remember the name of the organization or the speaker, but I'd remember that the talk was about cool new keyboards, so I named the link CoolNewKeyboards.

Furl allows you to store up to 5 gigabytes of searchable web pages in your account. Furl also privately archives a complete copy of the html of each page that you bookmark, making it accessible even if the original content is modified or removed. This means that if the web page has been moved, is temporarily down, or is now totally defunct, you can still look at a copy of it.

This feature makes it dramatically different from the other bookmarking sites.

To avoid claims of copyright violations, the archived copy is visible only to the member who bookmarked the page.

The service is totally free. After you sign up for an account, you'll receive instructions on how to install a button in your browser toolbar that will let you furl stuff by clicking the button. If you don't want or need any more buttons on your toolbar, there's another way.

Look at the advanced tools menu for the right click option. This is quite handy. Whenever you land on a web page that you want to save, you just right click on the page, choose furl it from the menu, and you'll be automatically taken to your furl account page where you can quickly log in and save the page.

This service is a great solution for saving important information from web pages and finding them easily when you need them many weeks, months, or even years down the road.
Sheryl Schuff is a Certified Public Accountant, author, and consultant who has been in private practice for almost 30 years. She teaches small business owners how to use PCs and the Internet to simplify their business operations. You can get Sheryl's FREE audio mini course with time saving tips at http://www.SherylSchuff.com