I’m quite an avid news and blog reader. While I personally prefer Sharpreader over most newsreaders I actually prefer to read my news in my browser for a number of reasons, most particularly is that Sharpreader uses a wrapped-around MSIE6 as its built-in browser, and I am really, really tired of IE.

My browsing habits may be quite familiar for some of you. I wheel-click through links on first-stop blogs (which those are, will remain secret) and skim through most of the opened tabs before moving along. However, before I discovered Furl (how, exactly, I have forgotten), I would remember something I read in passing and spend a lot of time clicking through my history trying to follow the trail to the post or news item I had in mind.

It is not a pleasant experience. But with Furl, all I had to do is add a simple bookmarklet to my links bar, click on it while another page is open, and it gets archived on my Furl space: a small portion of the five gigabytes alloted to me. Now, I no longer have to save a webpage (“complete” too, adding both an html file and a folder for each item) nor do I have to bookmark something that I might never visit yet again. All I have to do is Furl It, and all is well.

The archived copies are mine and mine alone to view. If I share my archive, all that will be shared would be links, and these links of course are not invulnerable to linkrot. It’s a copyright thing.

But given the choice of Furling something and saving it on my hard drive and using windows XP’s search functionality, along with my archive locked on to just my PC, I’d choose the former. Honestly? I haven’t Furled enough, considering how much I read. Then again, I suppose that’s a sign of the signal-to-noise ratio of my blog reading.

If you’re a blogger who reads and blogs at the speed of fright, Furl is a must have tool, and worth a try.