Social bookmarks

I believe it is good to have information all in one place. That way, you know where to look for it because there is only one place it can be. However, one thing about information is that it doesn't do you much good if you do not have access to it.

That's why I have been using iwon.com's capability to store and categorize bookmarks. Other web sites have capabilities for storing bookmarks, like Yahoo and MSN. However, the way in general that the iwon.com page can be organized is a little more aesthetically pleasing. In addition, iwon.com allows the bookmarks to be sorted in any sequence while Yahoo always sorts them alphabetically.

Anyway, this way of storing bookmarks has been useful to keep handy the sites I use regularly... But not a good way to store sites I ran across which I want to keep around. I've been doing that in my private blog.

My private blog as well is a place where as long as I have access to the Internet, I have access to my private blog (assuming Windows is running IIS ok on my machine). But it is not always handy to go to my blog to save a link and this definitely would not be a good way for my mom.

Bookmarks/favorites are ok but I never seem to organize them. In addition, those are stored only on one's own machine and not accessible from a public Internet terminal or someone else's PC. What I need is a place to store my bookmarks on the Internet! These are also known as social bookmarks.

I have found a few:

del.icio.us
www.sitebar.org
www.furl.net
www.spurl.net

del.icio.us does not seem to allow categorization. Ugh!

Both sitebar.org and furl.net allow categorization. In case of furl.net, it seems to allow multiple catgorization but does not seem to allow customized sequence. sitebar.org has a limit of 100 links for the free accounts. Spurl allows categorization and subcategorization, but also does not allow to customize sequence. Spurl seems to perform better than furl.

Therefore, the winner seems to be spurl.net although furl.net is close. I can use this as a backup for my links on iwon.com as well as categorizing anything I want to save from the web. Response seems to be a bit sluggish when I want to save a link. In addition, "furling it" does not necessarily sound like something I want to do voluntarily, but I guess it's just a name.

Impressively enough, furl.net also saves a cached version of the web page, so in case the page has changed and you cannot find the original information, you still have the cached version. I assume Spurl does the same.

Update: I am using Spurl because of the capability to display the bookmarks on the sidebar of the browser. It makes it very easy to navigate and find the desired bookmark without having to go to the Spurl website first.