Library clips

Clipmarks is like a social bookmark manager, only you can include a little snippet of the page you are bookmarking…sure you can do this in the clippings field when you bookmark in Furl, but clipmarks is solely focusing on that feature, making a new service that enables you to collect, organise, discover and share bits.

Actually this is very useful when you want to point to a paragraph in a long web post, I usually use PurpleSlurple which is a very valuable tool, but sometimes it doesn’t work, so Clipmarks could be the answer to point to a particular spot, or even better to encapsulate the start and end of the part you are refering to.
Actually if you want to refer to a few spots on a web page, or even from different webpages it becomes a very unique tool.

This is truly the scrapbook metaphor, as you are tearing out bits from a page. In the physical world, for example, in a newspaper, the title of the newspaper and date is usually on the header or footer of every page, if the bit you tear out doesn’t include this information you better manually write it on the back of the item so you remember its origin.
In the electronic environment nothing is lost, clipmarks lets you snip any bit you like but a URL is automatically recorded so you know where it came from…even better you can give it a title and organise the clip with tags, and share bits from your scrap book with others.

From their website:

“Bookmarks are for entire web pages. Clipmarks are for specific pieces of information on web pages. Just like when you read a magazine or newspaper, sometimes you want to highlight or tear out a specific part of the page, when you surf the web sometimes you want to remember specific pieces of content (like an image or a couple of paragraphs). Clipmarks lets you do that. You can give your Clipmark a title and tag it with keywords so you can retrieve it later from any computer connected to the internet.”

“You can select as many pieces of content from a page as you want (with the Firefox version of Clipmarks, you can also select content from multiple pages).”

If you can’t quite select the right bit to clip using the toolbar you can do it the old fashioned way by highlighting the clip area and using the right mouse click to “Create Clipmark”.

It’s got great usuability, if your clip is big, you can scroll it, or even expand the clip box.

Only catch is that it is not web-based, you have to download it, check out the public clipmarks to get an idea, or view the popular page

…when you do install it a toolbar automatically appears in your browser.

See the FAQ and the help for some action shots…and a demo, this is an informative site, just the way the user likes it.

Features

Of course this handy tool is shared in a folksonomy environment so you can share and subscribe to tags and users, etc…you can choose to make clips public or private…email a clip.

Since each clip has a permalink they are the perfect tool to point to as they have a uniqueID, this also allows for people to comment on a particular clip (you can get notifications when people comment on your clip)

See related tags

See a users account, tags, and tag cloud

RSS feeds for tags, users, and tags at the user level…and folders at the user level.

Follow a clipper - when you click on the + next to a user name you can add them to your clippers|follow section…I think this is a quick link blogroll type thing and not an inbuilt watchlist or inbox.

At the time of bookmarking, apart from adding tags, you can also file a clip in a folder.
I like the idea of both tags and folders as they are different things…folders are great to browse as a container, whereas tags are great for findability (so folders aren’t used as a hierarchy, but just in unison with tags)

…see more at an earlier post.
Actually I’d like to point you to the exact part in this post I’m refering to.
I could go back to the post, mark-up an anchor so I can link to the precise spot from this post, but that is way too much work…and PurpleSlurple doesn’t work in my blog, so what I’ll do is point you to the exact spot using clipmarks…here it is.

Previous tools are e-snips or wetaste for del.icio.us (which seems to not exist anymore), so pasta it is
…even snippy could of been part of the process.

Clipmarks is of truly great design and usability…don’t know why something like this took so long, it is going to fill a gap for my information needs that’s for sure!

Check for updates on the clipmarks blog.

[ADDED 2/11/05: I also noticed that on your personal sidebar there is a section where you can see an aggregate of all the comments you have made, and also comments made to you.]