Furl is a site for saving your favorites/bookmarks online. In other words Furl is a personal web site where you can store bookmarks and archive web pages. You can also learn what web sites others find interesting. Furl gives you 5 gigabytes of web space to store pages. Furl allows you to save anything you view on the web. You can also use it to share what you read on the web with other teachers or with your students. You can use it for many educational purposes :-

1. Web sites for student research or projects
2. Books recommendations
3. Professional research
4. List of books you would like to read
5. Placing web links on your school web page
6. Students can find resources at home and access them at school and vice versa
7. Share what you are reading on the web or view what your peers are reading on the web
8. Web site collections by school topic.

Furl is a social bookmarking site that makes it easy to save, share, and explore favorite web pages.

Advantage of using Furl : Following are the reason one can use Furl for :-

1. Search your bookmarks by keywords and topics.
2. Save site found using multiple computers (home and school) to one resource.
3. Access your bookmarks anywhere you have web access.
4. Share web sites with your students or peers.
5. Export your web sites into a bibliography for college or as a handout for your class.
6. Access your bookmarks as your computer crashes or you get a new computer.
7. Publish your saved web site links by category.
8. Learn about new sites from your “Furl Mates.”
9. Subscribe to other users’ Furl who look for similar web sites as you do.
10. Furl saves a copy of the web page. If it is moved or deleted, you still have access to the pages you bookmarked.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit

Over the past few weeks, and for many more to come, there will be a lot of debate about search engine consolidation. Today, the talk du jour is a Yahoo and News Corp. deal, a potential integration with MySpace and whether the talk is a real option or an attempt to force Microsoft to increase its offer for Yahoo. No matter, the consolidation discussion will continue.

One sure thing is that Yahoo is in play, and I don’t see the merry-go-round stopping until they link up with a solid partner. At the end of the day, it’s doubtful that Yahoo will be an independent player in 2009 and my bets are on Micro-hoo. While there are obvious challenges to a Microsoft-Yahoo deal, including cultural, technological and timing issues, Microsoft has the cash and the most vested interest in seeking a partner to increase their search scale and make inroads in the fight to give Google a real challenger.

No matter who wins the Yahoo prize, however, success in local search will continue to be driven by three key elements: content, traffic and technology.

Search engine consolidation could certainly create gaps in the market as the companies involved are likely to take their eyes off the local search ball while dealing with integration issues. This would create an Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) market opportunity to continue to capitalize on their strength—content gathered from large feet-on-the-street sales forces, proprietary databases of local business information and long standing relationships with millions of small businesses. Search engine players still have not cracked the code on these select IYP strengths.

While the latest data indicates that IYPs are gaining in their share of local commercial searches, traffic remains a challenge in comparison to search engines. Each IYP is tackling it by increasing the destination appeal of its site with new and improved content and tools—user reviews, maps, comparison shopping, video content and more.

Source : Searchengineland.com

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit

Read the rest of this entry »

Source : http://seattletimes.nwsource.com

Momentum is growing against eBay’s coming changes to the fees it charges to sellers and the way it handles feedback, with a “strike” that started Monday against the San Jose online auction company.

“I expect this to be the largest boycott of eBay to date, and I think this year will be very rocky for eBay,” said Ina Steiner, editor of AuctionBytes.com, a publication for online merchants, and author of a book about selling on eBay.

Steiner said that eBay changes always prompt reactions, and she admits that striking against eBay has been “difficult” in the past, as nonstriking sellers see an opportunity when rivals stay away from the service.

Still, she said, “eBay is shifting more of the burden to sellers, and there’s no question in my mind that for a certain percentage of sellers, it will be untenable.”

In January, John Donahue, who becomes eBay’s president and chief executive officer in March, announced changes to the fees eBay charges. The cost to list items will be cut 25 to 50 percent, but the commission that eBay charges for completed sales, what it calls its “final value fee,” will increase.

Besides those fee changes, eBay also said it will hold some PayPal payments for up to 21 days on certain transactions and will prevent sellers from leaving negative feedback comments about buyers.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit

Read the rest of this entry »