Clipmarks

Ahh, I see the folks at blogger.com have fixed some things.

I hadn't intended to look at Clipmarks, having already signed up for thingie, Furl, and something elsewhosenameI'veforgotten, but I got the info off of whatsit.

For some reason I can't turn off the html linking above. Blogger isn't completely fixed. Not even the "Remove formatting from selection" button helps.

I missed the article in the Sunday paper about the Día de los niños celebration which had two photos and a nice (if slightly inaccurate in places) article. We had the papers here, of course, being the library and all, and I made a couple of copies for the files, but then I thought I'd get myself a virtual copy! Save the trees, doncha kno'.

The problem in this scenario is not at all with Clipmarks, which worked easily. It was the Index-Journal's website. It's Monday now and the Sunday paper is nowhere to be seen. I was unable to find anything about the library in the search box except the pervert story. Oh, great. But for some reason, an article about the festival in McCormick two weekends ago was accessible. Go figure! Well, my wonderful genius of a husband just happened to be there so I gave it an eye-glazing and found his name. Now, I wanted to send this to him (he's in Baltimore this week), but why should he have to read the whole boring article just to see his name in print next to Y/Our Sparkle Heart (who will be performing at the library this summer, kicking off the reading program).

I knew there was a way to just mark the sentence, but I couldn't remember which of the thousands of helpful sites did that. So I went to the Learning 2.1 site to remind myself.
That's when I ran into Clipmarks again. I couldn't remember if it was Furl or Digg (just remembered the name of the other site) that did the highlighting and post-it notes (even my brain can't keep up with all of this) but I noticed that Clipmarks had what I was looking for. In two minutos I had the program installed and my profile filled out.

It was dead easy to use. I only had to scroll down the page with my cursor and it started selecting bits for me right away. When I had the right sentence in the crosshairs, I clicked it and then it asked me what I wanted to do with it.

And this is what you can do with it: embed it in a blog, send to MySpace or Facebook, or even march it straight to thingie (aka: del.icio.us, which I still consider a stupid name). Or e-mail it, and you can access your web e-mail (so long as it's a major one) from Clipmarks. So, I found Bob's e-mail (which I can never remember) and sent him just the bit I clipped.

Clipmarks is "powered by" Plaxo and I think they really missed the target by not calling it "Clipso" [Calypso]- but they didn't ask me, did they?

Now, the annoying part is that I couldn't find the article I wanted at our local newspaper's website, however, a search on the internet on my name brought it up elsewhere. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to view it. I'll give it a couple of weeks and maybe it will eventually become available. sigh. Stupid local paper. (Sorry, Richard.)

New Widget!

In case you're interested, and I'm sure you're not, the reason the blog comes up so slowly now is that I've added yet another widget.
"Why, Marfie?" you ask, tearing your hair. Oh, because I can. And it was so easy.
There's a new guy (R. A. Meyer) for October's Charlotte-Mecklenberg Library 2.1 learning thingie and because he hasn't actually put anything up yet (to date), I went to his blog, The Internet Can Change Your Life.
Waaaay down there was an entry on widgets, cute little tools you can add to your website or blog. I already have a poo-load of them, but I combed the list at mashable.com until I found something new I thought I could insert into this blog: the del.icio.us widget that shows the last few things I added to del.icio.us, which is a sort of traveling bookmark. Yes, we all have bookmark/favorite functions on our internet programs, but if you move to another computer (and I have one at home as well as two here at work I use), you have to find the site all over again and mark it. And what if you are out of town on business and, like me, you don't have a laptop? Or what if you are a library patron and you don't always get the same computer?
Post to del.icio.us (I hate typing that with all the periods so I usually just call it Thingie which unfortunately renders it indistinguishable from other Thingies)! Once it's on Thingie, you can access it from anywhere and find other people who marked it at well. Another step, and you can discover more interesting sites from their Thingie collections. Yes! It's a social bookmarking!
You can also mark your own blog or site and see how many other people marked it. I used this to see who and how many people linked to Bob's sites.
Right now the widget is a huge list, but perhaps if I add to it, it will show only the most recently ones. And perhaps after a while it will become a nuisance and I will ditch it. Only Time Will Tell.
Widgets: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore!

son of del.icio.us

Well, that's nice! Two people have posted my "Tales of the Blonde Shikseh" blog on del.icio.us! I wonder if I can find out who they are .... hmmmmmmm.
Well, it turned out to be a lie, but! But! BUT! You can find that out by looking at your bookmarks in del.icio.us (hithertoknown as "thingie" because I'm tired of writing that out). And I had to find something that already had a number of bookmarks to see what it looks like (the counter on my blog had just spazzed and shown me a false count). It will say how many people have that bookmarked and give the entire history of that bookmarking along with the notes people made and how else they tagged it. I went back and changed my tags because I saw better ones than mine. I also looked under some of my other tags ("library") and found a whole bunch of stuff other people thought intriguing on that subject.
This could be a way to search for websites on topics and get a better class of results because they would be sites other people thought "worthy." Or not.

del.icio.us

I've added a del.icio.us button and counter (it only counts adding to del.icio.us) to my blog here. Still not quite sure about del.icio.us, but signed up for it. I signed up for it because I found a bookmark at the site on Bob. Well, what's that all about, eh? He had a huge flurry of visits to his YouTube site and we were trying to figure it out. It has since died down. So far I've understood that del.icio.us will save your bookmarks from one computer to another, but it also shares your bookmarks with others (if you post to del.icio.us ... and, boy, is that annoying to type out). So I can have all my bookmarks at my finger tips if I have to move from one computer to another, without starting over or leaving them to clutter up other people's bookmarks/favorites lists. Gosh, how could I have lived so long without this. sigh. Sorry it doesn't fit in the space well with this blog, but it looks much better on my other blog.