Wiki for DLRL Virginia Tech: OnlineBookmarks

OnlineBookmarks

To share bookmarks with group members, class members, and the WWW community, you can use Furl.net (i.e., with homepage http://www.furl.net/index.jsp).

Furl is an online bookmark website.

To use Furl, setup its use as follows:

1. Apply for an account(Use your vtpid6604 as user name, e.g. one student's pid is pengbo, use pengbo6604 as furl account) at the Furl homepage, and when asked to check your email, verify your new account.

2. Add a Furl bookmark button to your web browser:

Start from http://www.furl.net/tools.jsp.
Follow the instructions.
It that fails, use the following trick in IE:
- Right click on the ‘furl it’ link and add it to ‘Favorites->Links’.
- Then show your links on the tool bar by
  - right clicking on the IE tool bar and
  - making sure the Links entry shows a check mark.

3. Test your ‘furl it’ button on some pages.

Just click the ‘furl it’ button when your browser is viewing that page(We use www.vt.edu to test).
Then fill in the form with additional information about your current page(write your keywords, comments and in new topic put 'university').
Select private if you do not want to share, else the entry will be shared(course related urls should be public/shared).
Now you bookmarked VT homepage, under topic university.

4. Another way to bookmark on furl is through this page: http://boris.dlib.vt.edu:9090/furlBoris.html

At that location, select Bookmark to Furl.
Then fill in the form with information from a page that you may have in a separate window.
Select private if you do not want to share, else the entry will be shared(course related urls should be public/shared).

5. Sample bookmarks that illustrate the shared bookmark archive of another student at VT can be seen at:

http://www.furl.net/members/mingcs6604

6. Sample RSS Feed address for that student's archive of bookmarks is:

http://www.furl.net/members/mingcs6604/rss.xml

7. You can see who bookmarked a URL:

Go to http://www.furl.net/home.jsp
See for example that. A+ Freeware - Home is furled by 12 members.
Click on the 12 members link. Then you can see who bookmarked this URL and read the users’s comments:
- http://www.furl.net/urlInfo.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aplusfreeware.com%2F

8. Once you have an account with furl.net

You can look at entries for each topic you have identified.
You can edit bookmark entries to change the topic list, improve the description, etc.
You can play around with the archives and topics before you log out.

9. Bookmark into mulitple topics

You can click Multi button on the furl popup window
You need to hold Ctrl key to select multiple topic
Tips:

Under My Archive tab, Click My Topics mark off Include default topics check box, click Set to save changes
In New topic field, you may have a semicolon ; separated list of topics to create more than one new topics at once. e.g. 6604All;6604as1;Digital Library

Using shared bookmarks for learning:

To allow grading of work, be sure to assign the topic mentioned in the assignment.
Always write comments to the page you bookmarked and use keywords to facilitate future searching
To look at archives of others, use Furl's search capabilities, or through url such as: http://www.furl.net/members/mingcs6604.
To aggregate all the bookmarks from this course, all bookmarks must be under 6604all and a specific one, e.g. for homework one you should use topic 6604all and 6604as1. You can use more topics if you want to. For example, I may bookmark Dr. Fox's paper as 6604all , 6604as1 Digital Library and 5s, using 6604all;6604as1;Digital Library;5s
To show all the furls under certain topics 6604as1, use: http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=6604as1

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