“Clipping” from sites as you read them – to bolster a point, riff on the news, or to save ideas for later exploration – is incredibly helpful. Bookmarking pages is great; noting the specific parts of the page that caught your interest in the first place is even better.
There are a good number of tools from the basic to the very slick. Microsoft just got back into the clipping game in a big way with Thumbtack. ReadWriteWeb looks at it and some competitors:
Earlier this week, we looked at Qitera, which has a feature set that is quite similar to Thumbtack’s, but while Thumbtack has a more interesting user interface, the actual bookmarking and information retrieval through Qitera is far superior to Microsoft’s product. Thumbtack also lacks any of the social bookmarking aspects that make Twine, Delicious, or Qitera interesting. Not everybody, of course, is interested in sharing bookmarks, and for those users, Thumbtack is definitely worth trying, though currently, we would recommend Qitera, Delicious, or Ma.gnolia, or the Google Notebook, over Thumbtack.
I’ve used Snipd, Clipmarks, PressThis, Sazell as well. I’m writing this post via Deepest Sender which has good clipping / research capabilities, too.
All of them are handy. We’re working on improving the feature set we use most.
