Clipmarks - Save, organize, and share clippings of Internet web pages

Posted on December 30, 2007 at 7:17 am

If you’re like most people, you probably read news articles online, follow 20 blogs on your favorite topics, and visit all kinds of cool web sites every day. That’s great, but it’s a tons of information, most of which you will probably forget before the next day!

There are tools out there that let you capture entire web pages or save entire web sites, but that’s simply too much information and takes forever. However, there are some really cool web sites that you can use to capture (or clip) only portions of a web page, store them in a way that is searchable, and share the clippings with others.

Clipmarks is by far my favorite! I had also written about another web app from Microsoft that let you store clippings of web pages called Listas. Listas is pretty good and has a lot of the same features as Clipmarks, such as a toolbar button to quickly save text, pictures or video, but it lacks some cool features of Clipmarks.

Listas also has the ability to share clippings with your friends, etc, but Clipmarks takes it further by allowing you to share your clips on the Clipmarks site, via email, straight to your blog as a post, and even on FaceBook! And you can either share your clips as a single item entry on Clipmarks or you can create what is called a ClipCast.

A ClipCast is pretty cool. Basically, you can have a specific topic, i.e. Best Quotes from President Bush, and then clip items from several sites that will then be displayed as a widget where people can flip through all of the clips. They can also post comments on your collection of clips, play it as a slideshow, give it a rating, share the clipcast, etc.

You can also include videos from YouTube in a clipcast directly and it will play fine. Other sites will provide a link to the source website. You can also add your clipcasts to Facebook by installing the app.

The really nice thing about Clipmarks is that when you clip something, you get to name it, add tags or keywords, and make it public or private. Also when performing a search, you can follow the same syntax as when you perform a Google search. That means you can use the AND, OR, NOT boolean operators to search. You can also include quotes for exact matches.

The other really cool thing about Clipmarks that Listas is lacking is the Digg style voting system that they have on their front page for public clipmarks.

Finally, the clip-to-blog feature allows you to instantly share things you find on the web by posting them to your blog. It supports, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, LiveJournal, Moveable Type, and Vox.

Overall, it’s a great web notebook and better than Listas and maybe even Google Notebook. It’s fast, easy to use, and has some really nice features, like searching, Facebook app, and the ClipCasts. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: clipmarks, web clippings, save web pages, store web pages, listas