Furl for Thought
January 30th, 2005Steven Johnson has a well-blogged-about essay in the NYT Book Review entitled Tool for Thought. In it he talks about a tool he uses to store all his research articles, notes to himself, and more.
“Having all this information available at my fingerprints does more than help me find my notes faster. Yes, when I’m trying to track down an article I wrote many years ago, it’s now much easier to retrieve. But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents I’ve forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn’t know I was looking for.”
That’s exactly what I use Furl for. For example, I’m starting to do research for upcoming books and presentations and remembered that I once came across a book about social capital that I had wanted to read. I did remember that I had Furl’d it and probably wouldn’t have remembered it otherwise. Yet another reason why I love web-based open-bookmark tagging tools. They help us in more ways than one. Tag, you’re it!