Furl, one of the first participatory bookmark managers, launched a while back, had some hype, got bought by LookSmart, and disappeared from the radar of the digerati. I’m now using three different bookmark services – and following the community of a forth – which is downright nuts – but I can’t help the curiosity – or the search for the ultimate one.

This is more for the benefit of my friends, family and co-workers who don’t know what a participatory bookmark manager is – and I think I just coined the term anyway. A participatory bookmark manager helps you organize your bookmarks online, making them accessible on any machine you use, they help you organize them in novel ways, and encourage you to share them, or subsets of them, with others. It’s in the sharing that the interesting benefits of all this start to emerge. It’s the sharing that reveals the strength of a participatory tool is bounded more so by the community that is using it then by the technical merits of that tool.

The four I find very interesting are RawSugar, del.icio.us, Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0 beta and digg. And remember Furl. Each has varying sets of features and more important – communities that show different preferences as to what is a good link and what is not. Check them out. Let me know what your favorite is and why.