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Clipmarks: A Highlighter for the Web

John Biggs
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007
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Biggs is the East Cost Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More


The NY-based team at Clipmarks just launched 2.0 of their product, a unique web clipping system that allows you to take just the paragraphs, sentences, or multimedia you want from a page while maintaining a link to the original document.

Their CEO, Eric Goldstein, was a lawyer who was fed up with cutting and pasting citations into a Word file only to discover that the 100 page mess became unreadable and unusable. He and his team launched a first iteration of the product, which Marshall looked at months ago, but the latest version is considerably more fully-featured and quite interesting.

The product is a Mozilla/Firefox or IE plugin that brings up an interactive clipping menu. When you scroll over text, Clipmarks highlights it and allows you to clip it to an email, to a blog — many CMSes are supported including WordPress and Blogger — to print, or just save. The clips are stored on the Clipmarks server and can be “popped” to the front page to share with other readers.

These popped stories allow voting and there is a running tally of popular stories on the homepage. Goldstein mentioned that there is no way to vote against a story so stories can only rise in the ranks or peter out, not be demoted by nefarious popularity gamers.

This social aspect is second to the actual usefulness of being able to grab snippets of text, store them, and even use them in blog postings. There are a number of Javascript things that perform similar tasks, but the formatting choices and methods afforded by Clipmarks is inconspicuous and potentially addicting.

In the brief time that I used it, I was able to grab videos, individual sentences, and even whole posts and drag them to a number of locations. There is a huge Clipmarks button that appears next to the menu bar in Firefox and things get really annoying if you hit it accidentally and start seeing blocks appear over everything on a page, but this is a small price to pay for the functionality afforded.

Clipmarks

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Showing 38 comments

  • Abogado Costa Rica lawyer 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand
  • Steven 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    I love this forum because people so often ask the questions that I would. With this post, however, I actually agree that I’m not as worried about the revenue. So many companies these days play what I call the “YouTube Lottery.” Everyone knows about the crazy money YouTube got, but not much is written (even on TechCrunch) about the 100s of companies that made it nowhere, They didn’t win the lottery the way that YouTube did.

    http://www.greatdownload.org

  • Czaries 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Dose anyone know of a website highlighting tool that does NOT require you to install a plugin? I am looking for one that is pure javascript - any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

  • Olivier 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Does anyone know of a site such as Clipmarks that lets you save Flash ads to a sharable online environment? Clipmarks seems to work only with animated images (i.e. gif files), not Flash.

  • River 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    I've been using Clipmarks for over a month now and I find it easy to use. I tend it use it more than my bookmarks b/c here I can just collect the parts of a website that I want.

    The social aspect of it is useful too when I want to see what other clippers have found on my particular subject of interest.

    Not sure how you got your "huge Clipmarks button that appears next to the menu bar in Firefox", but my Clipmarks button sits very comfortable and out of the way on my Google toolbar.

  • Bookchick49 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    I've been a member of Clipmarks for over 1 year now and have found it to be an excellent tool for many reasons.

    If I may clarify an issue noted above regarding Comment #25. There is indeed a limit to how much can be clipped. It's 1000 words. Anything above that is required to be saved as a private clip. As you clip an article, there is a 'count down' to the number of words you have processed in your clip, which appears in the browser. If you go over the 1000 limit, a warning is given that you have the option to scale back below the limit in order to publicly post the clip on your blog, clipmarks, etc. Or you can save it privately in your personal Clipmarks repertoire. Hence, it will be saved to your Clipmarks account and only viewable by / to you.

    The clipping intent of Clipmarks is and always has been promoted as "only clip the parts that interest you or that you wish to save." Whether this is a paragraph or a sentence or two, but always within the confines of the word quantity limits if you desire interaction over the clip with other members.

    There are also ways to print and / or save a clip to your computer. These options are available within varying areas of Clipmarks.

    Some members do use Clipmarks to save a few bookmarks. But I believe it was not the intention of the owners to be a 'bookmarking' site per say.

    Conversing, constructive debate and mature responsible interactions within the comments of clips is always welcome and encouraged. I have been amazed at some of the things that I've learned through the social interaction, and have even come around to changing my viewpoints about certain topics after listening to pros and cons and facts offered by other members.

    I hope this clarified a few questions that you might have had. Even if you register only to see 'how it works,' I can guarantee that you'll be sticking around a lot longer than you anticipated.

    ciao!

  • AP 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    #31:

    it would be more polite if clipmarks allowed publishers to opt-in (like... del.icio.us) such that they can determine the content they'd want users to clip. de-constructing someone's content without permission and re-purposing it for profit in the name of social sharing seems not quite 100% honest.

    out.

  • mashaziva 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    AP,
    This is a discussion that every company in this arena is asked, but I wonder what is truly the difference between the underlying concepts behind Clipmarks, i-Lighter, Diigo and cut and paste? The precedent for selecting content and saving or altering it came from these fundamental tools. The only program that I am aware of that precludes any of this is Adobe's PDF. Perhaps the creators of original content will have to find a way to preserve their material in its entirety and then take the risk that as a result, their material wont gain the same traction.
    Your comments seem to be concerned with who earns the ad dollars in all this and it will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the end.

  • marcy hoffman 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Laurent
    i-Lighter for Word and Power Point will come out in 3 months; i-Lighter for PDF and a MAC version is in the works. We will be releasing i-Lighter3 later in the year which will take i-Lighting to a whole new level.

  • AP 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    #25 :

    "as long as the service/application that grabs snippets of text/content does not recompose the content in a readable format where you can read it at 100% just like you’d be if you were on the original content but offers a link to the source (content owner) instead, then it is OK."

    at what point would the 'clipping' cross the boundary between a 'teaser' to the content to a content re-purposing? if the clip gives me the answer (or the 2 minute pitch) i am looking for, i probably won't ever go to tech crunch.

    and the last i saw, there is no limit on how much i can clip or what i can clip out of a page.

    interesting disruptive concept, and there seems to be enough money on the web to allow users to steal en-masse, so that it's hard for anyone to catch all of them.

  • ZuDfunck, Internet outlier. Cut the Cord crusader. Internet TV advocate. 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Hey Mr Crunch!

    Been meaning to tell you what a valuable site and service you provide!

    Downloaded Clipmarks and boy am I in love.

    Although it means I can't use Camino anymore, God I love Camino, I can blog up a storm with Clipmarks!

    Thanx Much...Z

  • J.P. 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Hey, Yo !

    You, all wise 2.0 people over there, can enybody give me any difference betwing this and "One Note" from MS?

    I know, I know. Is Ms and its not free, but... have you M. A. even try One Note?

    Its way far superior to this.

    My 2 cents.

    (I´m on a gangsta mood today ?! )

  • Laurent 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    To Marcy (Hoffman from iLighter): I'm waiting desperately for your version of iLighter that works on Word, PDF and PowerPoint. Is it in the pipes yet?

  • web 2.0 innovations 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    To AP:

    Quote
    if enough people clip techcrunch, clipmarks could get the ad dollars piggy backing on techcrunch content.
    Unquate

    I think you have a pretty good point, however, as long as the service/application that grabs snippets of text/content does not recompose the content in a readable format where you can read it at 100% just like you’d be if you were on the original content but offers a link to the source (content owner) instead, then it is OK.

    Yes, I think if enough clips are made over a given content, Clipmarks could make a few ad dollars, pretty fine by me, yet you would not be able to read the whole content based on the snippets alone, therefore as long as you cannot meaningfully read over these clips but, instead, you are sent to Techcrunch as the content owner (the source), then it is OK, in my view.

    After all this is what Google does too (as well as all other search engines out there), it just extracts parts of the content and serves the searchers with, but none of us can read the whole content based on what the search engine’s results are and still we need to click on the links to go to the original sources… etc, etc..

    We’ve been told about an interesting concept called NosyJoe that is, by the way, planned to be a new breed of social search engine that semantically extracts the meaningful components in the content (meaningful keywords, phrasal components and whole meaningful sentences) and then serves the searchers in a proprietary way by linking to the source and those guys there gave us pretty much the same explanation about the relationship between content owners and content mash-ups.

    My 2 cents

  • Akinas 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    This market seems to be really saturated.
    Convincing people to install a plugin for anything that is essentially the same as Blogger's Blog this or Bluedot.us' Dot This! is getting harder and harder.

  • taggy 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Nice plugin no doubt but there exists another addon for firefox solving a similar problem

    Webmarker (http://addons.mozilla.org/fire... )

    thanks
    taggy

  • SearcH EngineS WeB 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    This is a good and useful service -

    But knowing the litigious society and pocessive era we are in - if the product become VERY POPULAR, it will only be a matter of time until some company or website owner starts complaing about copyright violations :-?

  • pankaj 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    I agree with arifsali. Clipmarks covers a lot. Clips, blogs, news voting, tagging, bookmarking, socializing. In the end it all boils down to individual's taste of organizing personal information and ways to share it with others. I like news voting but sites like Digg and reddit are so big that its easy to get lost. Considering all this, clipmarks is one of the best tools. Diigo is similar tool but I use it only for bookmarking (on different services).

  • marcy hoffman 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Brian,
    Actually, I think we won the award precisely that although we opened with a heart stopping technical glitch, we got back to speed in under 30 seconds. It was, or so we were told, our response to the glitch that was admired. The fact that the rest of the DEMO went off perfectly helped. But that was months ago when we were in beta and this post is about a host of tools designed to save, organize and use web content. i-Lighter appeals to a broad demographic, some sophisticated and many seemingly elementary users that find i-Lighter easy to understand and use. I invite you to give i-Lighter a try and see what we have coming in the months ahead.
    Marcy Hoffman
    i-Lighter

  • Brian Solis 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Heather, thanks....I confused the two. It's i-lighter that I saw at DEMO. Although, I was a bit thrown when they won a demo god award b/c their presentation wasn't the best - in fact if I remember correctly, the demo didn't work while on stage.

  • Chris Matthieu 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Tably.com from Numly offers a similar highlighting/note taking feature whereby allowing people to comment directly on web pages (privately or publicly) allowing others to subscribe to your RSS feeds or search your notes or references.

  • tomas 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Am I missing something... I have used all these programs, and I-Lighter seems head and shoulders above the rest in ease of use... Im sold.

  • XavierAM 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    diigo.com seems to include all these functions, as well as some pretty cool group functionality and the ability to crosspost your highlights / annotations to a number of different services (not having to chose between my standby del.icio.us account and some new tool for marking up the web is a big selling point for me)

  • arifsali 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Clipmarks is not just to annotate, clip or highlight, Clipmarks is a far superior "social" experience for those who are into Digg, Reddit, etc. You get into the social experience with Clipmarks and all of a sudden you're looking at far sophisticated and mature crowd to interact with.

  • Robert Scoble 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    I have a video interview and a video demo of ClipMark with ClipMark's founder here: http://scobleizer.com/2007/02/...

  • Amy Wilsch 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    John - the IE plug-in is "coming soon"....

  • Amy Wilsch 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    I'm in love with this post & all of you commenters here. For the past several years I too have been taking screen shots, pasting into corel or paint or photoshop, marking up what I need, pasting back into word to create documents for specs. Result: time consuming, huge docs that are unstable and a host of other problems. I got so used to I never bothered to think there might finally be a solution out there.

    I am taking the rest of the afternoon off to play with these and find one that I like. This will make my life so much easier. Thanks~~

  • AP 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    this is an excellent site for the consumer. but does this mean that the content owners would be screwed over? for example, if enough people clip techcrunch, clipmarks could get the ad dollars piggy backing on techcrunch content.

    http://www.clipmarks.com/tags/...

    saving clips for personal consumption is one thing. re-distributing it probably needs more thought.

  • ron 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Citebite.com beats all of these. It is dead simple to use, doesn't require registration, and offers a Web UI, a bookmarklet and a Firefox extension. i-lighter requires a download/install and is only available for users running Windows XP. Clipmarks requires registration and IMHO is far more truck than most users will need.

  • Adrian Keys 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    I understand Eric's frustration. This product definitely has some utility (and the responses to the post have highlighted other products as well).

  • heather 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    I checked this out.. but I think i-lighter is far superior (this is the one from demofall that won a 'demogod' award. I dont think its close. Just my opinion (have been using it for 3 months religiously!)

  • Brian Solis 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    I believe I saw this demonstration at Demo Fall last year. It did stand out as a functional app that I could use everyday. Funny, I forgot about them until now.

    Thanks!

  • Kula bácsi 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    I use Scrapbook on Firefox, I don't care about that share/publish bs.

  • Eric Skiff 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Hi Jimmy, this is Eric Skiff from Clipmarks,

    We're pretty big fans of Flock.

    The obvious main difference between clipmarks and flock is that clipmarks is available as a plugin for firefox and IE, so you don't have to change browsers browser to get this functionality.

    Another big difference is that Clipmarks stores a repository of your clips at clipmarks.com (if you want) so you can refer back to them, sort them by tags, and share them with others. You can even post them to a blog long after you first clipped them.

  • singularis 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    there is google notebook which I use in firefox which is simpler but does the job for me.

    Highlight lines or paragraphs right click and select "Note This" and a mini notebook appears to the bottom right of my screen with what I had highlighted and the url to where I got it-- which I can then expand which loads Google notebooks where I can organize where to slot it to if I want.

  • Jimmy 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    Cool cool...

    Flock does this natively, though. The feature is called Web Snippets. Rock on. (I'm now a flock evangelist... lol)

  • Laurent 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    check also ilighter.com which was designed for students and lawyers. One of their blog post says that iLighter might soon work for word and pdf.

  • Zaid 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand

    This is a DREAM come true honestly if it is as cool and simple as it sounds!

    I've yet to try Clipmarks but from the first few sentences of the review it is exactly what I search for before the end of each semester with a half dozen papers to do and dozens of research sources to keep track of.

    This is what google notebook should have been.

    -Zaid

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