Choosing a Social-Bookmarking Tool

Social Bookmarking Tools (I) A General Review, presents many of the social bookmarking tools and examines the history of social bookmarking. This paper also looks at an emerging new class of tools, like Connotea, that cater more to the academic communities and that store not only user-supplied tags, but also structured citation metadata terms.
Furl is another social-bookmarking site that is free, owned by Looksmart. It has some useful features that del.icio.us does not. Furl saves a snapshot of the entire page, not just a link, which would be helpful for those times when links no longer work! Furl organizes by keywords rather than tags and gives you the added option of building topic folders. Furl gives you several ways to find out what other people are saving. When you click to see your saved page, you can see a list of others who have also saved that page. Then you can click on any of those names to be taken to a page of links saved by that person. While some people might be uncomfortable with this idea, I think it has tremendous potential when is comes to doing research. Think of how much easier it would be to find research articles when you find others who might be researching the same thing! You can access their folders to see if anything there is of interest to you. Furl even allows to you subcribe to a person’s folder by simply clicking on the RSS icon inside the folder and copyping the address that comes up into your Blog Aggregator. I found that Furl was less-user friendly than del.icio.us in the set-up but I like the additional features it has to offer.