“Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are.” is an anonymous proverb.

While I have no intentions to use Spurl.net to tell you who you are, the proverb highlights how important the information we consume is. Every day we take in a lot of information from a variety of sources. This information shapes our ideas, opinions and to some extent our personality. Given this fact, it is amazing that people don’t try to keep a better track of their information consumption.

I guess there are two reasons:

1. Suitable tools have been missing.
2. Because of the lack of tools, people haven’t really given its importance a thought.

Spurl.net is aimed at solving this problem. I’ve tried to implement it so that it becomes a seamless part of users’ browsing activity. See something you find interesting or want to store for later reference – a single click of a button marks it, indexes it for you to search later on and even stores a copy of the page so that it will always be available even though the original page changes or becomes unavailable (so called linkrot). If the user wants, he or she can add more metadata about the page such as a comment, a custom title and a suitable category in a personalized hierarchy of categories, all efforts to help the user locate the information again later.

The conscious effort to mark something is important, as only a part of the abundance of information we consume is worth being able to track later on. The marked information thereby becomes a record of the consumption that the user rates as important or somehow significant.

While I’m not totally convinced that “personalized search results” are the holy grail some people claim it to be, I’m sure that most users will find it hard to imagine how they managed without being able to search the interesting part their own browsing history, once they’ve become accustomed to it.

With this record in hand, Spurl.net can also offer the user a lot of interesting value adds on top of the core “store & search” functionality mentioned above. The recommendations, syndication possibilities and the “spurl beam” (see: Spurl.net page, all mentioned features require login) only scratch the surface of a wide range of functionality that can and will be offered utilizing users’ spurl history. Some of these are already being built into Spurl.net and will be introduced in the coming weeks.

While these are all nice frills, I will try to keep focused on the main vision as detailed above. As before, all comments and suggestions are welcomed.

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As an end note, nicely portraying the importance of the information we consume, here are a few of the sources that inspired my Spurl.net implementation in the first place:

• “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush
• Grand challenge Memories for life led by Ehud Reiter and Andrew Fitzgibbon.
• “Tapping into the Beam” by David Gelernter (published in The Next Fifty Years).
• Microsoft’s MyLifeBits project
• Out of Control by Kevin Kelly
• Smart Mobs (book and blog) by Howard Rheingold
• Emergence and a range of articles by Steven Johnson
• Linked by Albert-L�szl� Barab�si