del.icio.us, furl, Google

There's been little action up in here lately, so thought I'd share a few random links. I do have a couple ideas for more substantive posts--almost started one yesterday on C Hitchens, actually, after reading this in Slate; and got another one in mind on Sartre and existentialism, after reading this Norman Mailer piece in the Nation. And I got a way of bringing Brother West into the Sartre piece, thus following up on Johnee's post from a few weeks ago.

Speaking of which, it's dawning on me that the blog structure--or maybe it's just the Blogger structure?--isn't that well-suited for the kind of chime-in, threaded conversations that I'd like to see us having here. Stuff just gets buried in the comments. Any ideas for a better interface that facilitates that kind of thing?

Which brings to mind another link I was thinking of throwing up--the recently launched TPMCafe. In particular, some folks up there had been name-dropping Habermas and his concept of "the public sphere." Check here and here and here. Interesting stuff. In any case, TMPCafe is something to keep your eye on.

But back to the random--but hopefully useful--links I was going to offer up. Last month I e-mailed a few of you about del.icio.us and Furl--new and seemingly trendy takes on the idea of creating on-line bookmark managers. I recall that there were a couple such attempts to build such sites in the late '90s; I was particularly interested in them then, b/c I was always getting on the web on random machines around campus, and thought it would be useful to get at my bookmarks wherever I happened to be. And more generally I've got an archivist streak in me, which is why I started blogging in the first place--to save all the fantastic links one comes across. But the interesting links keep coming up faster than I can blog them; hence the need for a place to save them in the meantime.

Del.icio.us and Furl are interesting b/c they take advantage of tags--useful both for classifying/searching your own bookmarks, and for connecting with what other links user's have bookmarked and tagged (i.e., the "folksonomic" aspect of tag-based systems).

So I created accounts on both sites, and installed the "Post to del.icio.us" and "Furl it" buttons to my browser. I've been using the del.icio.us more regularly--you can see the links I've saved here--although Furl does have the advantage of saving a copy of any page you link on their servers. (Useful for grabbing NYTimes articles, say, before they go into the paid archives!)

However, I did randomly log in to Furl yesterday, and found that they display a list of popular links, which led me to these two useful Google-related links:

• this OSX-style interface for a variety of Google tools


• this quick reference to Google's advanced operators for searching

Finally, I came across a mention of this recently, which is still in GoogleLabs--a way of personalizing Google's search page. Esp useful if you're using gmail.

Another sign that Google is so much more than search. Actually, I think I read about the personalization experiment in an article that claimed that this is evidence that Google aspires to be a portal. But as I've read in a few places, they aspire to much more than even that. I was impressed by this piece that I came across last year, about how Google may be building an OS for the web. (It occurred to me after reading it that Google would be a good long-term investment--how I wish I'd acted upon that that thought and picked up a few shares of Google then.)

Then there is Google's much-hyped initiative to build a virtual library; see for example this MIT TechnReview piece, titled "The Infinite Library" (to bring it back around full circle, just last week I was wading through one of Hitchens' typically dense and cryptic literary essays in The Atlantic, this one about Borges). Finally, I came across this blog entry about another fascinating idea Google is working on. (Note that that's from the blog of the same writer who wrote the TechReview piece. He's got a piece in the works on "continous computing" for the TechReview, for which he's been conducting an experiment in "participatory journalism" on his blog.)

There is some interesting stuff happening out there...