Full Circle Associates

I love practical blog posts. I enjoyed Amy Gahran's 10 Cool Ways to Use FURL, the collective URL tool.

Here are her first 10. Check the article for her pitfalls and recommendations as well.

1. Periodical or blog support: Links die. That's just the way the Web works. Online publications include a lot of links, and print periodicals list more and more URLs (for stories and advertisers). Creating a Furl archive to support your publication can help preserve the value of older links.

2. Discussion group support: Some online dicussions mention a lot of links – articles to check out, recommended sites or services, etc. Hunting through archives of postings can be exceptionally tedious, and often fruitless. If you designate a "furler" for your discussion group (someone who creates a Furl item for every link referenced in the discussion), finding those valuable nuggets can be much easier later on.

3. E-learning reference: The e-learning experience often yields references to online resources and examples that come from both the instructor (or course creator) and the students. Why not save and organize all that valuable material in a Furl archive, where topics relate to specific sections of specific lessons?

4. Editorial planning support: Journalists and other writers who produce stories for publications get their ideas from somewhere – often from items they find online. Typically, writers gather their ideas in preparation for a story meeting for each issue, and then sit down in a room or conference call, pitch them, and get assignments. Often in this process a lot of stories get e-mailed, faxed, or printed and passed around the group. That part of the process might be handled more effectively through a Furl archive.

5. Project collaboration or committee support: Similar to the editorial meeting described above, in the planning phase of many kinds of projects collaborators or committee members seek new ideas, useful resources, and relevant examples. A Furl archive can be a good way to collect, organize, comment on, and share such material.

6. Rudimentary blogging: Many blogs are little more than link filters. That is, the authors mainly link to relevant items, perhaps with a short comment, rather than write article-style entries. If that's all you want to do with your blog, why not just create and syndicate a Furl archive instead?

7. Research support: Journalists, scholars, and others who conduct project-focused on ongoing research can use Furl to support their work. For instance, this is what my "drinking water" folders in my Furl archive are for.

8. Telling friends about cool news stories: We all do it – see a cool story in the news, copy the text, and e-mail it out to a bunch of your friends. Probably some of your friends are sick of getting those e-mails. Why not offer them a webfeed instead, that they can check out at their leisure in a more organized fashion?

9. Online bibliography: Many white papers, research reports, theses, and other documents contain bibliographies or footnotes that feature Web citations. Again, links can die – but you don't want your audience to lose access to the source material. Creating a Furl archive for each such publication can help preserve your source materials for future reference.

10. Clips file: Many writers, designers, and others have samples of their work online, and they periodically want to show examples of their work ("clips") to colleagues or prospective clients/employers. Organizing all this stuff in a Furl archive is a more reliable and convenient way to store and distribute such materials than keeping a filing cabinet stuffed with paper and making lots of photocopies.

Well, there is one suggestion that really rings true for me that I can't resist posting:

* Furl needs real group access. Right now, only an individual can create a Furl account. However, you can provide access to that account to a group simply by setting up the account with an e-mail address designated specifically for that account. This is easy to do if you have your own domain and can create new e-mail addresses for it, or are willing to create a free e-mail account for it (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.). That's not much of a hassle, but Furl should recognize that groups such as project teams will want to be able to access the same archive.