Furl users transfer to diigo

The much loved research tool Furl is being absorbed by Diigo – a social bookmarking tool for serious research.
Like many, over the years I’ve found Furl crucial for research when I’ve needed access to saved versions of pages – not just bookmarks. Unlike delicious, Furl let me save whole pages to its servers rather than just the link. It also came with a heap of other tools that let you network with other users. Out of the blue, however, this week Furl’s one million users were told that diigo has acquired Furl after Furl’s owners – LookSmart – changed focus.
‘We worked hard to find Furl a home where loyal users like you could continue to benefit from best-of-breed social bookmarking and annotation tools,’ Furl said. ‘Hands down, Diigo was the winner due to its innovative approach to online research tools and knowledge sharing.’
Again, Diigo is probably a more reliable and flexible research tool than delicious. You can:

• highlight parts of web pages and archive those section;
• attach ‘sticky’ notes to pages;
• save pages and your notes to Diigo’s servers;
• share saved files to with a project team;
• network with other Diigo users by contacting them directly or watching what they save; and,
• explore by tag.

As I’ve stressed before, if you’re involved in serious research one of the biggest problems with delicious is the fact that web links can become inactive very quickly. If you need reliable access to your source material quickly – you need another solution. I’ve no experience with Diigo so I’ll monitor its service over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, if you’re a Furl user, Diigo has set up an easy way to transfer your archive. More on Diigo soon.

When you have to cite your online sources

There is no doubt that the many social bookmarking tools that exist often offer great networking services and ways you can monitor areas of interest effectively. But you can run into problems if you rely on a social bookmarking site as a file to store away your online sources. If you are working on a sensitive story that relies on web-sourced evidence then that can evaporate if the site owner pulls the page, alters the relevant text or changes an image.

I worked for years on the BMJ Best Treatments project and out-of-date links to academic sources and public-targeted government advice were a continual headache. One study has found that 13% of internet references in scholarly articles become inactive after only 27 months. But perhaps an even bigger problem is when the link stays intact but the content changes. If your story depends on a particular source and it changes then where do you turn? Does your publication have a policy on this?

Some social bookmarking sites offer a partial solution. Furl.net lets you save the entire page to Furl’s servers where you can access an exact copy of the page without going to the source URL. I always use Furl when I’m working on anything even remotely sensitive. Another tool – WebCite – allows you to copy web pages and store them remotely. The difference here is that WebCite gives you a way of citing a source permanently. When you use WebCite in a published document you cite the original source URL and a WebCite reference and you can be sure the WebCite link won’t change. Readers can then click on the WebCite link for the archived version. WebCite is supported by a range of academic and scientific publishers who already have an incentive to keep the service running. Check out its FAQ for information about its funding and security.

While many journalists find services and tools such as the Way Back Machine useful there is no way you can rely on it to cite a source. WebCite offers a range of other tools including a ‘WebCite This’ button for bloggers. See here for more on that.