Clip It Good!

April 23rd, 2007

I do a massive amount of research on the Web, involving an amazingly diverse range of subjects–everything from transfinite numbers to my favorite Ed Wood films, the sex lives of mollusks to random lists of archaic words. But what good is information if you can’t keep it? Printing out thousands of pages is certainly the most reliable means of producing an archival copy of an ephemeral webpage…but I’m not about to torture my printer (and my wallet) by forcing it to cough up thousands of documents per day! Bookmarking works to a degree, and I’ve both an extensive local library of bookmarks (kept via Firefox) as well as a more-convenient, searchable online repository of bookmarks. But the problem with bookmarks is: webpages come and go…and what good is an archived URL if it leadeth one to nothing but the vale of 404?

Besides…sometimes, I don’t need to keep track of the contents of an entire webpage. If all I want is the body text of a news story posted on CNN.com, I don’t want to save all of the extraneous graphics and dense-packed text that surrounds it like the rampant muttonchops on a Victorian gentleman’s phiz! I used to use the wonderful Scrapbook extension for Firefox, but Scrapbook exacerbates Firefox’s notorious hunger for ever scrap of free memory a thousandfold and renders the browser so topheavy it makes Photoshop CS2’s resource-hoggery look as benign as Notepad’s. Then I tried Google Notebook, which is a nifty little service that integrates well with Firefox via its own extension and allows you to save snippets of information from webpages…but, despite the fact that it evinces Google’s powerful simplicity very well, it’s actually pretty limited and sometimes confusing to work with. So…what next?

Actually, Microsoft OneNote 2007, which can be purchased separately or together with various implementations of Office 2007. OneNote is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the most handy research tool I’ve ever used. It allows you to save, organize, and easily search snippets or entire pages’ worth of information taken from websites or any other highlightable text source such as documents, PDFs, emails, and so forth. Best of all, it saves But my purpose here is, surprisingly, not to extol the seemingly endless virtues of OneNote…for two reasons:

1) It’s designed to work seamlessly only with Internet Explorer 7, which is okay if you use Internet Explorer 7. (I don’t, obviously.) Some of the page-saving functionality that makes OneNote so powerful only works right if you’ve opened a particular webpage in IE7.

And 2) It ain’t free. Nor is it particularly cheap.

Admittedly, I use OneNote a lot. Because I have Microsoft Office 2007. But c’mon, folks…you know you’d much rather do your clippin’ and savin’ for free, right?

That’s where Clipmarks steps in.

I discovered Clipmarks via Lifehacker a few weeks ago, and have been lovin’ up on the service ever since. The best way to describe Clipmarks is that it brings together the best aspects of social bookmarking and Scrapbook. Much like Google Notebook, Clipmarks allows you to select different parts of a webpage to save as “clips” to your account–but unlike Google Notebook, Clipmarks offers you a wide range of options for dealing with that clipped material. Witness!

I’m looking for information on Antarctica–specifically, the region of Antarctica around the Ross Ice Shelf–for a short story I’m writing. The Wikipedia page for “Antarctica” is jampacked with information, only a small amount of which–a paragraph’s worth, basically–I actually want to keep. So, once I’ve set up a Clipmarks account and installed the handy Clipmarks Firefox extension, all I need to do is click on the Clipmarks button in the toolbar. A little temporary toolbar appears that allows you to click on various elements of a page (say, the paragraphs containing info on the Ross Ice Shelf) and then save those highlit sections to your Clipmarks account. When the save window appears, you have a number of options:

You can save the clip publicly (which means it can be searched for and viewed by other Clipmarks users) or, of course, privately. Public clips have a ceiling of 1000 characters per saved clip (so they can easily fit on the public “Recently Clipped” pages), but private clippings have no upper limit.
You can assign tags to identify the clip. Wouldn’t be a Web2.0 site if it didn’t feature tagging, though, would it?
You can assign the clip to collections, which are, in essence, folders in your Clipmarks account to add a further level of organization to your clips.
You can add your own personal remarks to the clip, to summarize it or complement it with your own insights.
And, further, you can bookmark the clip’s originating webpage to your del.icio.us or mag.nol.ia account, post the clip to your blog, email it to your friends, print it, or select to have it queued up at Arecibo to be beamed to nearby stars as part of SETI’s “Wikipedia Gallactica” project (the latter not yet fully-implemented, alas).

The truly interesting thing about Clipmarks is that the site is, naturally enough, a social site as well as a private site. It encourages users to share their clips and to comment on one another’s material. In my short time using the service, I’ve discovered how handy being able to search others’ clips can be: doing a quick search of “Antarctica” reveals an breathtaking variety of material clipped from various sources around the web detailing everything from life on Antarctica to plans for terraforming Antarctica and making it habitable for human life (which is the gist of the story I’m researching)! Best of all, if you really like the material that a particular “clipper” has been posting–perhaps someone with interests very similar to your own–you can add them to the usual friends list and have a direct feed of their output delivered right to your Clipmarks doorstep.

Now, Clipmarks is not for everyone. If you’re an outdated privacy freak, you may find the site suspicious because it stores all of your research and posted clips on a nonlocal server and allows others to browse your stuff (unless, of course, you tell Clipmarks to save all clips privately by default)…and if you don’t happen to have access to an Internet connection when you need to find a particular clip, you are S.O.L. But at least take the site tour before writing it off; there’s a LOT to like about Clipmarks, especially if you’re a research-mad infovore like myself.

That said, I still do like to keep a local record of my researches that I can easily back up to CD-R periodically. Which if why I still use Microsoft OneNote in conjunction with Clipmarks. It’s trivial to cut’n'paste clipped material from Clipmarks to OneNote, after all, and between the two applications, I need never again worry about losing carefully researched materials!

But again, OneNote is nice if you can afford it*–but, truly, Clipmarks is all you really need.