Science definitely needs more rap. Definitely.

Note: This video is part of the second American Chemical Society Nanotation NanoTube Video Contest. You better believe I’m gonna watch the other entries.

Later today I’m giving a talk at an entrepreneur’s group about how you can get more benefit out of social media by using hashtags. I’ve found that these can be exceptionally valuable tools to connect with topics and people. They also can help you make yourself (or a topic, organization, or event that matters to you) much easier to find and connect with.

I’ll be fleshing out these ideas in a later blog post. But for now, here are my main points I intend to make — Plus some resources I will to demonstrate…

HASHTAG MONITORING TOOLS

Hashtags are a radar screen to pick up early on trends, emerging issues, events, breaking news, etc. Business intelligence, spotting opportunities, troubleshooting, etc.

Use a Twitter client or service that lets your monitor hashtag. Twitter search, Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, Monitter, Twitterfall (article by Paul Bradshaw), and Twazzup.

Why not just monitor regular search terms, rather than hashtags? Use both, if you like! But search terms tend to be more inconsistently spelled or phrased and thus are more difficult to search for. Still, it can’t hurt. If I’m really into a topic, I’ll usually start my radar screen by monitoring several search strings (hashtags and not) and then hone in on where most of the action is. But when a community forms around a topic, one or more hashtags tend to crop up.

USE HASHTAGS ROUTINELY

Great way to get known as a go-to person on a topic.

Great way also to find smart, interesting, or important people on topic of interest to you. And to encourage serendipity based on your interests.

Popularity rules. Whatever hashtag is popular for a topic, use that. Like ad keywords: Use hashtags that reflect the perspective of the people you want to connect with.

Be specific: Easier to get reputation as the go-to person on a specific topic like #coalash, rather than a general one like #environment. Use both if you’re not well-known yet.

Try using hashtags in a sentence. Less awkward and more intuitive than jamming them all at the end.

If you see a hashtag and don’t know what it means, try looking it up in Tagalus or WTHashtag. If you don’t find it listed, @reply to the people using it and ask them what it’s about.

START HASHTAGS!

This is a great First search Twitter to see if it’s already in use. Don’t overlap current hashtags. Then register via Tagalus to make it easy for others to look it up.

Or tweet: @tagref: [#hashtag] is [definition, link]

More detailed listings: WTHashtag wiki — another good place to register hashtags.

If you have a company or brand that’s short, start & monitor the hashtag for the company name.

LIVE-TWEET EVENTS

Find out the event hashtag in advance, follow it, and use it for all your event tweets (including pre and post). Great way to get followers. They tend to stick around after the event.

Example: I recently called an event hashtag (#futurej) for a Senate subcommittee hearing on the future of journalism. Promoted it by searching for “future of journalism,” told those tweeters about the hashtag, and thanked people who used it. It caught on — About 900 tweets used it.

DELICIOUS TAGS ARE COMPLEMENTARY

For your radar screen, if you monitor a hashtag on Twitter, there’s probably a corresponding tag on Delicious. Use subscriptions function for tags on Delicious to expand your radar screen. My current Delicious tag subscriptions.

The Chicago Tribune recently reported that it has halted a “short-lived research project in which the Chicago Tribune solicited responses from current and former subscribers to descriptions of Tribune stories before they had been published.”

The project — a collaboration between the paper’s editorial and marketing departments — was stopped because reporters raised journalistic concerns. Originally it had only surveyed selected “would-be readers” about general topics and previous Tribune coverage. But in the last two weeks, participants had begun being surveyed about their preferences on synopses of stories currently in the works.

In all, 55 reporters and editors voiced their complaint in a letter to Tribune editor Gerould Kern and managing editor Jane Hirt. The letter “expressed concern that providing story information to those outside the newsroom prior to publication seemed ‘to break the bond between reporters and editors in a fundamental way.’”

Here’s more detail about how the research was conducted: “Surveys were sent by e-mail to around 9,000 would-be readers on two occasions. About 500 responded to each, indicating which of 10 story ideas they preferred. Kern said the stories ‘tended to be news features,’ and the results never made it to him or had any impact in how stories were handled.”

I can understand the reporters’ complaint if their story ideas were shared outside the newsroom without their prior knowledge and consent. However, if that consent can be obtained, I personally think this type of research could be surprisingly useful. Especially if the people being surveyed truly represent younger people (i.e., the news organization’s future market) as well as demographics that historically have not been well served by the news organization…

I’d even take it farther — rather than just vote on a packaged list of story ideas, I’d survey them about which angles on those stories would most interest them. And I’d give them room to critique the story ideas, and get new story ideas. A combination of qualitative and quantitative data could shed light on how news organizations can make their news more relevant by being willing to step outside their comfort zone.

Chicago Reader sees it differently, however. There, Michael Miner wrote:

“Tell any self-respecting reporter that the subject of his or her latest work in progress just laid an egg with a focus group, and the reporter will reply, ‘Maybe so, but wait till they see what I do with it!’ (While thinking, ‘What in God’s name has happened to our business?’)”

…I don’t doubt that many longtime newspaper reporters would feel that way. But I don’t think it has as much to do with “self respect” as it does with pride and fear. It seems to me that many journalists prefer to only present their perfect, finished work to the public in order to pretend that their reporting is more independent and infallible than is actually the case. They’re easily threatened by the thought that someone might witness their messy sausage-making process. It used to be that this pretense of perfection was assumed to support the veneer of credibility. In fact, these days being aloof from your community and pretending you’re perfect only undermines credibility.

When Jim Romenesko noted this news a few days ago, Poynter reader Gary McCardle commented: “Marketing people do what marketing people always do. Aside from special themed sections, don’t let marketing people know about stories in advance of publication.”

That comment lays bare the distrust of marketing — and perhaps indirectly of efforts to involve community members up front in journalistic processes — so deeply ingrained in traditional mainstream newsroom culture. And I’d dare say that it’s a big reason why news organizations are struggling for relevance and revenue these days. It’s hard to update your business model when an important part of your organization is inherently wary of market research.

NOTE: This is an expanded version of an article I originally published in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.

According to Nieman Lab, “Media Cloud is a massive data set of news — compiled from newspapers, other established news organizations, and blogs — and a set of tools for analyzing those data.

Here’s what Berkman’s Ethan Zuckerman had to say about Media Cloud:

Ethan Zuckerman on Media Cloud from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

Some of the kinds of questions Media Cloud could eventually help answer:

• How do specific stories evolve over time? What path do they take when they travel among blogs, newspapers, cable TV, or other sources?
• What specific story topics won’t you hear about in [News Source X], at least compared to its competitors?
• When [News Source Y] writes about Sarah Palin [or Pakistan, or school vouchers], what’s the context of their discussion? What are the words and phrases they surround that topic with?”

The obvious use of this project is to compare coverage by different types of media. But I think a deeper purpose may be served here: By tracking patterns of words used in news stories and blog posts, Media Cloud may illuminate how context and influence shape public understanding — in other words, how media and news affect people and communities.

This is important, because news and media do not exist for their own sake. It seems to me that the more we learn about how people are affected by — and affect — media, the better we’ll be able to craft effective media for the future.

(NOTE: I originally published this article in Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

On Jan 14., the Pew Internet and American Life project released a report on Adults and Social Networking Services. It said, “The share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has
more than quadrupled in the past four years — from eight percent in 2005 to 35 percent now.”

Over at the Knight Digital Media Center News Leadership 3.0 blog, Michele McLellan observed: “It appears that American adults are moving into social networks more quickly than top 100 news organizations…”

The Pew report defines social network sites as “spaces on the Internet where users can create a profile and connect that profile to others (individuals or entities) to create a personal network.” MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are classic examples of this model, and they’re useful to research. But this research leaves out other powerful services that enable people to easily self-organize into social networks: Twitter, Ning, Meetup, Delicious, Digg, Slashdot, LiveJournal, and even news communities such as Newsvine and NowPublic. As such, I suspect Pew’s research vastly underestimates the proliferation and growth of online social networking among U.S. adults.

McLellan cited recent Bivings Group research which found that only one in 10 major news org sites offer social networking features such as the ability to create profiles and “friend” others. According to McLellan, “This suggests news organizations are limiting their reach to being familiar destinations or findable on search — both of which are valuable, but not enough. …I fear the problem is cultural, and perhaps less tractable than technical constraints.”

Furthermore: “The old, still powerful culture of the newsroom may suggest that there is ‘one way’ to get readers just waiting to be discovered, a quick fix that will build audiences and create revenue. Now. That fix used to be home delivery. Now it’s the Web site — if only we can figure it out. That’s a fallacy: It’s not the site, it’s the links, the connections and the network. It’s trial and error and trial again.”

I think McLellan is on to a couple of interesting things here. First, that mindset and culture — not resources and technology — are the key barriers to news orgs benefiting from social media. This is especially true since most social media can be leveraged for no cost at all. Second, she notes that the willingness to continuously experiment is the most likely path to success in media. This includes not just trying out new technologies, but learning how to value engagement other than pageviews on your site.

Right now, in the midst of industry-wide retrenchment and even despair, it can be hard to put energy into opening up, reaching out, and making connections. But trying to hold on tight to a shrinking piece of the action is no way to move forward. As Pew, and McLellan, indicate, social media can be one of the more rewarding ways news orgs can connect more fully with their audiences and communities. Investing in this particular mindset change, and treating social media as a priority rather than an afterthought, might yield surprising advantages.

(NOTE: I originally posted this article to Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

The growing number of citizen journalists (of various flavors) obviously are willing to do at least some of this work — but they don’t always know how to find what they’re seeking, or have sufficient context to even know what might be worth pursuing beyond the narrative line chosen for a packaged news story. Also, lots of people who have no desire to be citizen journalists still occasionally get interested enough in some news stories to want to check them out further first-hand. They just need encouragement, and some help getting started.

Therefore, it helps to consider that news doesn’t always have to be a finished story. In some cases, or for some people, a launching point might be even more intriguing, useful, and engaging. Here’s one option for doing that…

For several years, one of my steady freelance gigs has been writing for the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Tipsheet — a biweekly e-mail newsletter that gets distributed to thousands of journalists and is also archived online. Tipsheet presents ahead-of-the-curve or under-the-radar environmental journalism leads with background, sources, resources, and angles to consider.

One of this publication’s strengths is that we include specific links and contacts. We don’t make Tipsheet readers hunt around for, say, the correct government scientist, or the correct report document, to begin their research or independent verification. We list names, e-mail, and phone numbers (when they’re already publicly available, or with permission). We link to specific Web pages and files. We offer access to a diverse array of sources. We recommend discussion forums and provide details on upcoming meetings or events. We also link to existing coverage and commentary that illustrates interesting approaches or provides unique insight.

This approach goes far beyond the “what you can do” toolboxes. Already included with many news stories. It’s about helping people find and define their own stories. Here, engagement is the main event — not an afterthought. It’s about storyfinding, not just storytelling.

To see how this works, check out a couple of recent SEJ Tipsheet articles: Supreme Court Case Affects Nearly 550 Power Plants and Eco-Packaging for Wine: Bottles and Beyond

In short: Even though SEJ Tipsheet is intended for an audience that knows how to find this stuff (professional journalists), we give them a significant head start by doing much of the initial legwork and synthesis. That’s the core value of our Tipsheet — we don’t just give journalists ideas; we make it easier and faster for them to get started.

Perhaps the tipsheet approach might appeal to more than just journalists. Perhaps it might also prove compelling to schools, concerned citizens, businesses, and more? Maybe, in some cases, even more traditional mainstream news audiences such as voters or cost- or health-conscious consumers?

For instance, instead of (or in addition to) writing a story about a school board meeting, a tipsheet piece might offer context and leads to help citizens explore, understand and engage in a thorny local education issue.

Or, rather than write a story about a change in the local crime rate, crime statistics could be presented in context with related statistics (especially economic) and diverse sources to help people discover potentially meaningful patterns and various possible interpretations.

Or, rather than interview one or two sources for a radio piece on a new museum, a tipsheet could help people understand how the museum relates to the local community — including who paid for it, and who is likely to visit.

Would most people want to explore the news on their own? Probably not. But then, “most people” don’t care about any particular story you can find in a mainstream news venue. The “general audience” is a myth. When you get down to the story level, news has always been about niches. Every piece of news has its own community of relevance — and every news topic offers myriad potential stories.

What do you think of this idea?

(NOTE: I originally published a slightly different version of this post on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.)

This series is a work in process. I’m counting on Contentious.com readers and others to help me sharpen this discussion so I can present it more formally for the Knight Commission to consider.

So please comment below or e-mail me to share your thoughts and questions. Thanks!

If you want to strengthen communities, it helps to ask: What defines a community, really? Is it mostly a matter of “where” (geography)?

Last week I got into an interesting discussion with some folks at the Knight Foundation and elsewhere about whether “local” is the only (or most important) defining characteristic of a community. This was sparked by an event held last week by the new Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy — an effort to recommend both public and private measures that would help US communities better meet their information needs.

From the time I first heard of this project, I thought it was an excellent idea. It bothers me deeply that many (perhaps most) Americans routinely “tune out” to issues of law, regulation, and government that not only affect them, but also that they can influence — at least to some extent. (I say this fully aware that I often fall into the “democratically tuned out” category on several fronts.)

The problem then becomes, of course, that when citizens don’t participate, their interests are easy to ignore or trample.

Why do so many Americans abdicate their power as citizens in a democracy? It seems to me that many are too quick to “blame the victim,” pointing to widespread apathy, ignorance, or a prevailing sense of helplessness as common democracy cop-outs.

I think there’s a different answer: The way our democracy attempts to engage citizens actively opposes human nature. That is, it just doesn’t mesh well with how human beings function cognitively or emotionally.

Fighting human nature is almost always a losing battle — especially if you want people to participate and cooperate….

Face it: It’s hard to stay motivated about participating in democracy when your attempts usually leave you feeling like you’ve been bashing your head against cloudy plexiglass, struggling to read documents written in Latin. In 5-point type. In bad lighting. With the pages lacking any discernible order or context. And you only have time to read a tiny fraction of them.

…I’m not kidding. As a journalist, I’ve covered energy and environmental policy at the federal, state, and local levels. So I’m intimately familiar with such civic info-inspired headaches. I’ve wrestled with obtuse legislative information systems. I’ve probably sacrificed years of my life to decoding cryptic legalese and bureaucratese, to learning the dialects and idiosyncratic processes of various governmental bodies, and to collating conflicting or seemingly unrelated information from disparate sources. I’ve sat through many, many mind-numbing public hearings and meetings. And I’ve interviewed public officials and employees who treat transparency primarily as a threat to their fiefdoms.

I expect would-be newcomers to the democratic political process (people who want to initiate ballot initiatives, or run for office) face even steeper learning and procedural hurdles.

My experience is why I suspect that apathy, ignorance, and helplessness are probably not root causes of US civic inaction. Rather, these inhibiting emotions are totally natural effects that occur when human beings repeatedly encounter overwhelming obstacles to participation.

As things currently stand, simply finding and staying informed about relevant issues brewing at all levels of government — as well as understanding the processes of, and forces at work in, a huge multilevel representative democracy — is damn hard work! I don’t expect it to be effortless, but it’s certainly much, much harder than it needs to be. Or should be. Or could be.

We could do much better by developing civic information systems that work with human nature — our abilities, our constraints, our preferences, how we relate to each other, and how our brains work.

In the rest of this series, I’ll sketch out some ways we might achieve this goal.

(NEXT: Part 2, Beyond Government…)

2,400 Newsroom Jobs Lost: Biggest Dip in 30 Years

WASHINGTON — After years of mildly reassuring numbers tracking the size of newspaper newsroom staffs, the latest American Society of Newspapers Editors’ annual census leads with a bombshell. Fulltime professional news staffs fell by 2,400 last year, a drop of 4.4% to a total of 52,600.

It was an even larger decrease than the 2,000 drop-off in the recession year of 2001. Since the census is completed as of the end of 2007, the tabulation does not include hundreds more buyouts and layoffs already imposed in 2008.

Still think it’s fair to focus almost exclusively on preparing tomorrow’s journalists to work in yesterday’s media, while acting like the business of news isn’t really their business?

Picking up on my post yesterday, Univ. of Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams challenged me (and her other readers) to translate my quick list of what j-schools should be teaching into a something more testable and measurable that could be translated into a curriculum.

Here’s my first shot at that:

• Content management systems (including blogging tools): First, I’d have the students run a group blog on a topic of their choosing for a year to get comfortable with the content and commenting apects of blogging. (A group blog is likely to get more activity and discussion than individual blogs.) This blog should be based on an expandable, customizable tool like Wordpress. Then the students should be taught the basics of information architecture, and from that figure out how to expand or customize their blogs to deliver or integrate new kinds of content or services. This could be as simple as finding and installing Wordpress plugins to add features, or integrating content from other places (such as Flickr or del.icio.us). The goal would be to get them to not just understand, but demonstrate that on their own they can envision, research, evaluate, and act upon options to do more with their content online. There’s a lot you can do without getting too geeky. They need to gain the confidence that many options are within their personal grasp — they don’t always need to get permission or beg someone else to do things for them.

There’s a lot more on my list, of course…

• Mobile tools and mobile media strategies. These students all have cell phones anyway. Require them to subscribe to mobile news and information services, and critique the quality of the service and user experience. Also, require them to create whatever kind of content their phones support (photos, video, audio, GPS data, even just SMS to Twitter, etc.) and post or stream it from their cell phones. Include participatory exercises based on SMS or MMS to include students who don’t have data plans on their phones. Free services like NowPublic, Flickr, Qik and CNN’s iReport could be especially helpful and even fun for your exercises.

• Social media. The point here is to help students learn a key tool for engaging communities, while also gaining experience with how influence works and information travels through social media. I suggest starting with whatever social media services most of the students are already using (like Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Twitter) and explore both the one-to-one and group interaction options through exercises. For groups, it’s probably better to get them involved with existing, active groups on these services — rather than try to start a new group from scratch. Where possible, use both web-based and mobile options for these services. They should learn to use these tools for community outreach, story/issue research, and promotion of their work.

• Economics and business theory/models. Journalism students should be taking courses in the media business that offer the fundamentals of historical, current, and emerging media business models. They should learn what budgets and balance sheets look like, how grant funding and investment works, and how to evaluate the economic environment they’re operating in — including how it’s changing. Get them used to seeing the big picture and looking ahead. Practical skills could include analyzing the economic environment of the local community, spotting emerging trends that could offer journalistic or other media opportunities, and writing a basic business plan to capitalize on those opportunities.

• Business skills. This could involve evaluating and estimating revenue options from grants to investors to advertising to subscriptions to partnerships and more, as well as knowing what steps to take to pursue that funding. Example exercise: Develop a strategy and action plan for increasing online revenues for the campus or local daily paper — including calculation of expenses and revenues, and a timeline for implementation. In addition, they should be aware of what it takes to start and run a business — requirements for taxes, healthcare, getting SMS shortcodes, working with advertisers, etc. No part of the business that supports their journalism should be alien to them.

• Management skills. I’m envisioning this both from an entrepreneurial and organizational perspective. In all exercises, put the students in a decisionmaking role and guide them through learning how to manage time, resources, and people — whether employees, collaborators, or community members. For instance, if a class project is increasing online revenues for the campus paper, divide that mission into sub-tasks, assign someone to manage each part of that project, and require them to make decisions and delegate. Teach them how to use tools like Basecamp to coordinate team efforts. In fact, it might be a good idea to coordinate projects with other j-schools around the country or world, since increasingly in the media business project teams are widely distributed. The point is to encourage them to take charge of the process, not just to pigeonhole themselves as content creators.

• Marketing, advertising, and SEO. In addition to taking a marketing basics class oriented toward media products and services, j-students should learn the basics of search engine optimization — since findability generally translates into traffic, engagement, and revenue for most media ventures. Exercises can include learning to use Wordtracker to optimize headlines, stories, and metadata to increase both traffic and relevance; using Google Analytics to analyze traffic patterns to a news/info site (such as for the campus paper) and suggest strategies to boost traffic and engagement; developing and running Adwords campaigns (with a modest budget) to promote a class project; researching niche ad networks that might help support various types of coverage or beats, etc.

• Community engagement and management. This is perhaps one of the most marketable skills any journalist can have for the next several years or decades. The point is to get them used to creating news as part of a conversation, rather than simply as a one-way product for publication. It’s about promoting constructive public discourse through active engagement. Exercises could include participating in an active community forum; working as a volunteer moderator for an active forum where contentious topics arise; taking and active role in editing and discussing a Wikipedia page of interest; helping to coordinate (not just cover) local events like town hall meetings, conferences, or festivals; participating in or running local meetup groups, etc. These experiences tech how to handle conflict, foster consensus and diversity, produce events, and demonstrate respect and understanding for communities in order to build credibility. In this respect, working through local government, advocacy groups, social service agencies, neighborhood associations, and ethnic or religious groups could be as valuable (maybe more valuable) than working through journalistic or media organizations.

…I realize that my list sounds like a hell of a lot of stuff, but I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what today’s journalists really need in order to take advantage of current opportunities, spot emerging opportunities, and take charge of their own destinies (rather than relying on a paternalistic news org to shelter them while they write, write, write).

I realize also that there may be resistance in journalism schools to much of what I propose, for reasons ranging from “we’re not a vocational school,” to IT staff resisting implementing the kinds of tools I’ve mentioned, to the need to integrate curricula more closely with business schools, to the tenured faculty who must teach at least some of these topics not knowing or caring much about them.

I’m not saying this would be easy. But I do think what I’ve outlined, in addition to teaching core journalism skills and values, is what today’s j-students really need to prepare for the kinds of careers they are most likely to have — and the kinds of media they can play a key role in inventing or developing.

Thoughts?

(And thanks, Mindy, for making me think this through more.)

First, the good news: I love Furl. I really do. I have for several years. It’s long been one of my favorite social bookmarking tools because it includes several features beyond basic item tagging and descriptions:

• Archiving: Furl saves a complete copy (or at least, it attempts to, and lets you know if that attempt fails) of every web page you bookmark there. So when you search your archive, you’re not just searching the metadata, but the complete document. As a journalist and general research hound, I’ve found that immensely useful.
• E-mailing: I can e-mail a link and comment to people I know as I bookmark something in Furl. Google Shared Stuff allows this, but other popular social bookmarking services (like del.icio.us) don’t.
• Optional privacy: I can mark Furl items as private or public — and I can specify private to be my default setting.
• Ample comment space: Furl allows me lots of space to record notes about the items I’m bookmarking, or to clip quotes from the content. No ludicrously tight character limits like the appalling 255-character ceiling on del.icio.us.

…Now, the bad news: In the last six months or so I’ve been using Furl less and less — even though I still believe it’s a superior service — mainly because the site’s not keeping up with state of the art user interface issues. That is, I’ve found that it’s getting progressively more difficult to use Furl, compared to del.icio.us and Google Shared Stuff.

Furl, because I love you and I want to see you thrive, here are my tips for how you can upgrade your service…

1. AJAX, please! Right now, Furl’s interface requires too many clicks, which makes it time-consuming and tedious to use. For instance, if I choose an item from a drop-down menu, I shouldn’t need to click a separate button to confirm an implement my choice. The whole interface needs to be smarter and faster, like the overhaul Surveymonkey did recently. AJAX could help a lot here, I think.

2. Optional tie-in to e-mail address book. Often I mainly want to bookmark something because I want to recommend it to one or more specific people I know — and I correspond with a LOT of people. Right now if I want to e-mail someone for the first time an item I’m saving in Furl, I must manually find and add their e-mail address to my address book in Furl. Contrast this with Google Shared Stuff, which automatically ties in with my Gmail address book and can usually guess who I want to e-mail with just a few keystrokes.

Yeah, there are privacy issues here — so this should be completely optional with a heavy privacy policy and no spamming. But I’ve gotta admit, often saving the time it takes to retrieve, copy, and paste an e-mail address leads me to choose Google Shared Stuff over Furl.

3. Sub-topics. Furl calls tags “topics,” which is fine. However, since its archiving and other features make it a great tool for research projects, it would make sense for users to also be able to designate sub-topics.

For instance, I routinely use Furl to gather and process leads for the articles I write for the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Tipsheet. I have leads I’m going to pitch as stories (fodder), leads related to active assignments, leads for completed stories, and “backburner” leads we didn’t use but that I don’t want to forget about. Rather than have separate “Tipsheet this” and “Tipsheet that” topics in an increasingly unwieldy one-level menu, I’d rather have a “Tipsheet” topic with subtopics related to my procedural steps — and maybe sub-sub topics related to specific environmental issues covered. The more I use Furl, the longer and more complex my topics list gets, and the less I want to use it.

4. Active vs. inactive topics. Often I set up a Furl topic related to a project — and eventually that topic is finished or goes away. Yet the topic remains in my menu. I’d like to be able to designate topics as “inactive” so they’re still in my archive, but not cluttering my day-to-day menu.

5. Improve Furl-It button Firefox performance. I’m an avid Firefox user on Mac. I don’t know if other people are having this problem, but for the last several months, whenever I click the Furl-It button it opens a pop-up window UNDER my active window, forcing more clicks just to get to the window. Also, about every third time I use this feature I find I need to log in to Furl again. More steps = less Furl usage, sorry.

6. Simple interoperability with other services. I use del.icio.us daily because it offers the “daily blog posting” service that generates my linkblog posts on Contentious.com and other blogs. That’s fine for keeping useful content coming to the blogs when I don’t have time to write much — but I would greatly prefer to archive in Furl a copy of everything I’m bookmarking in del.icio.us. Furl does allow you to import del.icio.us bookmarks, but it’s a lot of work and is not updated automatically. Why can’t these two great services just play nice?

7. Groups. Sometimes when I’m researching a topic online, I’m not working alone. I’d like to be able to use Furl as a collaborative tool with my fellow researchers — and have the option of making saved items available to a specific group, as well as only to me (private) or to everyone (public).

…Those are the main improvements I’d like to see. And Furl, if you don’t want to lose me, I really hope you pay attention. Also, Furl, I’d love to hear more about what upgrades you do have planned.

What about my fellow Furl fans? Have you been using Furl less in favor of other services? If so, why? What kinds of upgrades might draw you back to Furl?

I do hope Looksmart isn’t slowly starving this great service. I’m frankly kind of worried that’s what’s happening. If so, please just be honest about it, so your loyal users can decide what to do. But if Looksmart is still serious about Furl, I hope they get serious about keeping pace with growing expectations for user experience.