If you are a serious blogger – then you sure are one of the biggest consumers of information on internet. Obviously, you might have faced the problem to recall “that” interesting article that you have read few weeks ago and would like to reference for the new blog entry...if true, then this blog entry is for you.
Dr. Srini (DS) is a professor from a prestigious US university and I met him during early 2005. One aspect that came to my notice was DS' meticulous practise of printing and archiving every important article that appeared on New York Times, WSJ, FT, and some innovation/R&D sites. DS printed these articles every morning after his 6AM Yoga. That meant that he always walked into our offices with a fresh Day’s Folder filled with many new articles printed from the websites. He would have marked each page with appropriate tags and would have highlighted key words, sentences or contact names.
Organising each print into folders and then stacking it up at his library; I was curious: why does he do this? Why doesn't he simply save bookmarks of those pages? His answer was, he wanted to read them again & again and wanted them to be easily accessible. Then my suggestion was, why not store each HTML page onto his hard disk. For which he mentioned, for his technical understanding, it was a bit hard to ensure the content was saved 100% offline, as the FT and NYTimes made their content premium in 3 or 4 days after publication. He had experienced difficulties in loading that page again without really trying some workarounds with Notepad or Write. The closest comfort zone for him was IE browser’s History; however, back then his issue was that it was not possible to retain history of any webpage after 99 days (max).
I am not sure what DS does now...but I have learnt the importance of collecting important articles, organising them effectively and the ability to find the article again, easily. But print versions were for me. With Google Desktop Search, finding any digital content on desktop was becoming very easy. I went ahead with printing each interesting web page into the PDF and storing it locally onto my disk (of course in different folders – however the challenge still is to ensure a meaningful and correct filename to the PDF).
This was amazing and works very well, till you realize that either (a) you are using an office PC, which one day will be upgraded, formatted or simply allocated to someone else anytime or (b) have a space crunch.
Today, there are many sites offering online bookmarking that can be accessed anytime and from anywhere (and you can share them with your friends too!). Main ones include Digg and Del.icio.us. However, these sites lack one major feature – the ability to store a personal copy of the webpage along with a bookmark. With such a feature, the interested content can be stored and accessed from where ever and whenever you want to. Some of my favourites are Yahoo! My Web and furl (Google has no such service!) Now amongst the above two, I suggest furl - because it offers a very important feature compared to others - i.e. to download all your personal copies at any later stage as an archive. Check out another wow of the Internet world: http://rss.furl.net/furlFeatures.jsp
1 comments:
Sad to share the FURL has shut down its operations as of early 2009. Does anyone know of alternative services?
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