Forbes buys social bookmarking site Clipmarks

August 7, 2007 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

picture-1.pngClipmarks, one of the many startups that helps users collect and organize information from around the web, is being bought by Forbes Magazine, an inside source tells us.

The New York-based startup lets you select text, photos or videos on web pages, then use Clipmark’s bookmarking feature to save the URL and your selected information to your Clipmarks folder. From there, you can share your “clips” with friends and colleagues and even search to find the most popular clips on the Clipmarks site.

Founded by a lawyer disgruntled with pasting citations from articles into an ever-growing Microsoft Word document, Clipmarks’ features go a step further than established bookmarking services such as Delicious.

It lets you choose only a phrase or paragraph of text, or a specific photo on the page to bookmark. This means your bookmarks more obviously point to the information you think matters most.

Forbes finds the service useful for helping their reporters collect and share information about articles they are reading — and you may soon be seeing Clipmarks used in their stories and blogposts. They’ll clip something, and then blog something quickly around it.

We can see the value of this service for reporters selecting Web items on the fly, pasting it into an editor, and providing a brief comment — and so this may be a good home for Clipmarks. However, for pure research purposes, we find other services more useful. For example, RSS readers, such as Google Reader, help us manage the deluge of fresh information being published across online news sites every day.

Other startups that provide similar social-bookmarking features include Grouptivity (our coverage) and Plum.

Back in 2006, we noted a “locust swarm” of social bookmarking startups that were receiving funding even though it wasn’t clear how any of them would make money. Clipmarks seems to have found the same answer as Delicious: get bought — most likely for a small sum — by someone who needs what you made.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • RBA
    "Forbes finds the service useful for helping their reporters collect and share information about articles they are reading "

    That's a reason to use the service, not quite to acquire it. Unless the offer was undeniably good, I sense Clipmarks could have benefited more from having Forbes as a client rather than selling their entire business to them, but again, we don't know much about the complete story.

    I for one favor selling the service over selling the company, especially at such early stage. Am I crazy?
  • Hi!

    I'm a director of Forbes and have been directly involved with the Clipmarks team.

    Let me add two things to the thread. First, the story is premature, but only by a little. Second, Forbes is committed to transforming business journalism so that our audience gets more insight about business and investing in a lot less time. We think Clipmarks will play a really key role in this. We are committed to supporting Eric and his team as the continue to develop the Clipmarks site. In addition, they will embed the technology in the Forbes.com site to ensure that this amazing functionality is available to our editors and readers.

    To RBA - you are not crazy. We were open to every possible option; this is the one that worked best for Eric and the Clipmarks team.
  • RBA
    Thanks Roger. BTW we'd love to have Forbes as a client. Let me know! :-)
  • along those lines and sure to be snapped up by someone soon: The Fantasy Futures Exchange, it's wonderful niche financial site created by Karel Baloun-formerly of Facebook. It's the ONLY existing website where people can papertrade futures for free with no time liimits without dealing with a brokerage firm, opening an account or being hounded by a brokers to open accounts. Fun and Educational. Slightly different concept but definitely in the financial realm.
  • mozzer
    Roger --
    Having met Eric and looked under the hood myself, it's an ok tool without a lot of there, there, quite frankly. (Though I understand that the goal of a fund like Elevation is to take those contrarian bets.) Guess his angel well dried up. Really hope you're getting this one for a song...
  • MB
    I'd have to disagree with you Mozzer. Yes, on a business level there might not be a lot there. However, they do have something very unique in the ways they let you manipulate data sets (this might be boiling it down too much too). Combined with the interfaces that they have for letting you manipulate data, it creates a really powerful tool for doing SO many different activities. I hate to compare things to Google, but all they had back in 1998 was a 200,000 page database, accessible by a rather unique search method. That wasn't much either....but given time and adoption of ideas and shifts in the way we view/use the internet, Google has had its way. I think it ends up being personal preference for what exists that drives opinions, because the various applications of the technology could be invaluable to different folks. This would never be fair if we were trying to compare business models, because this is a complimentary technology, sort of like a prosthetic limb, but like 10 of them.
  • Peter Siel
    To Roger McNamee from Forbes:
    Congratulations on the purchase, but have you considered Simpy? Simpy is another social bookmarking service from NYC, and I find it much more interesting and useful than Clipmarks. It's probably too late for you to change your mind, but have a look anyway.
  • I couldn't understand some parts of this article Forbes buys social bookmarking site Clipmarks, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
  • talaeltri
  • Hello

    Nice collection of Top Bookmarking sites. I just came across another indian Bookmarking site.

    http://www.Tagza.com

    Mostly you will find every kind of links there.
  • I'm probably running behind, but did Forbes ever go through with the purchase of Clipmarks?

    Clipmarks is a great service - use it every day - and they continue improving it.

    Andrew
  • Fantastic write up pertaining to Forbes buys social bookmarking site Clipmarks! I love this view.
  • Val
    Take a look at http://www.entopica.com/, a new online system that allows you to easily access, categorize, share and store your bookmarks online.It is free to join and registration is both quick and easy. Discover a whole new world of social bookmarking.
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  • ClipMarks, which is based in New York, enables you to clip things from the web — text, photos, videos, etc. — make selections, and save them to your ClipMarks folders. In a similar way to how Del.icio.us works, ClipMarks focuses more intensely on browser integration and solving the problem for online researchers and students rather than focus on getting everybody to replace their browsers’ Bookmarks.
    ------------------------
    williamgeorge
    Social Bookmarking
  • maximilian
    Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.
    In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

    ========================================

    maximilian..max

    Social Bookmarking
  • I really enjoyed this article on Forbes...Very Interesting!
    Thanks!
  • Reaally good post
  • bookmarkingdir
    one more PR2 do follow social bookmarking site onlinesocialbookmarking.com