As a follow-up to my earlier post, I’m happy to report that I’ve had a satisfying email exchange with Furl’s Mike Giles. On the PDF front, Furl is planning to index both .pdf and .doc files in the “near future.” (No, he didn’t give me a timeline.)
Even more interesting is the possibility regarding Creative Commons. Currently, Furl only makes cached copies available to the account holder for personal use; you can only share the original URLs. But Mike is open to the possibility of working with CreativeCommons.org to allow Furlers to share content that has the appropriate machine-readable CC metadata. (Of course, he couldn’t make me any promises at this point.)
This is potentially a huge step forward. I believe that Furl could provide a major boost to CC license usage on the web (and vice versa). If this is a feature that would make you more likely to use Furl, then I encourage you to contact Mike with your use case.
Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.
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