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The Internet archive is (or was) meant to help ease this problem.

We also have sites like Furl that allow users to save a page for later.

The Google cache retains the contents of a site for a short time (that is, if it doesn't include noarchive tags)

Visitors to a site always have the option of saving a copy.

The issue isn't necessarily that copies don't exist, it's that there's no structured way that will ensure some copy of everything gets saved.

And when individuals "save" a copy of a website, there's no way that they make their saved copy available for historians to look at later.

The problem of personal archiving, declaring certain archives public, and making such snippets available has not been generally solved.

I use http://www.furl.net/ which satisfies the requirement mentioned: "a good solution would have to keep copies, not just references". Furl lets you save the text of the page you have visited, as well as the link. It saves them on the furl server, so you can furl from any machine. I notice that Furl has become less popular. I don't know whether people moved to http://www.spurl.net/ instead. I think the pdf solution may be best for the long term.

Furl is a bookmarking site, and while furl was already a verb, its use has changed and grown by quite a bit since http://furl.net/ launched. Google was also a word before google.com existed, although it was spelled "googol".

And if there's any doubt about furl's popularity, a google search pulls up 89 million results for "furl" and over 61 million for "furl.net"

I shall Furl your post.

check it out FURL

Yahoo calendar does let you send calendar events, but only to other users of Yahoo calendar. It doesn't work across systems, but it's something. Also, if you share your Yahoo calendar, you can search for blocks of common free times with other Yahoo calendar users.

I used Yahoo to manage my life in grad school, and it worked beautifully. I still use it.

The calendar lets you specify two different alert times, and you can have the alert sent to two different addresses. Regular alerts went to my Yahoo mail account. Important ones also went to my cell phone. (Like girlfriend's birthday reminders.) I didn't need anything more elaborate than that.

I used Yahoo mail to get my university email. Since I moved between work, school, apartment, and girlfriend's apartment, having mail and calendar remotely hosted was perfect.

The Yahoo address book fits my needs fine.

After school I paid the $19 a year to upgrade. You get 2 gigs of storage, more filters, and no ads in the mail system or calendar. I like Gmail, but I prefer the Yahoo mail interface (especially the ad-free version.) And even the free version with the ads lets you choose your colors.

Security: Yahoo updates their virus profiles more often than I update mine. And I do it at least once a week; usually more often. But the Yahoo security experts are just better than I am, as I'm no security expert at all. So Yahoo mail and a non-IE browser, and you've already closed off a lot of holes, even when you're forced to use a Windows machine.

I like Gmail, but to run my life I need an integrated calendar. I'd like to see a Google calendar. Who knows what features Google would come up with? Just because I can't think of something brilliant to add to a calendar doesn't mean they won't.

Oh, and My Yahoo offers you a lot in the way of news aggregation. Their RSS system is a bit less than perfect, but I do use it. What Yahoo does is a solid job of integrating good, but not fantastic, components, and the integration is what makes it extra useful.

Having said all that, their system for storing bookmarks sucks (for now). I use Furl for that. Excellent system.

I furled it in case it goes away (you need to be signed in to furl for the link to work).

Similar...and there's a RSS feed.

Furl.net

What makes delicious so cool is that you don't need to make a complex hierarchy to organize your links: Instead, the program lets you slice 'em and dice 'em based on the tags: Just go to "del.icio.us/userid" and you can browse all your bookmarks.

Anyone tried Spurl or Furl? They seem very similar to del.icio.us. Any recommendations about which one to use?

The "save and organize links" is stupid in a web engine: you usually decide that a web page is worth saving after you have read it, and then you are no longer seeing the results of the search. It is far better to have a separate tool like Furl and Spurl, that you activate with a bookmarklet.