VentureBeat

Clipmarks, 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.

(updated version)

Yoono is the latest start-up to offer a “web clipping” feature to let you manage your reading and collaborate with others.

For those who’ve never heard of Yoono, it is a French company that offers a social search engine. It gives you downloadable toolbar that, with varying degrees of accuracy, displays websites, blogs, and news articles related to the Web site you’re visiting at the time. When we last wrote about them, in early December, they were claiming 200,000 users, but according to them, the winter months went by and that figure tripled–a somewhat stunning burst, considering Yoono’s low profile.

Yoono “officially” launches and shares its newest feature at the Web 2.0 Expo next week. This new feature is “Buzz It,” a souped-up and smooth-looking mix of Clipmarks and Grouptivity. (See coverage here.) Blending the functionality of its two new rivals, Buzz It allows you to “clip” pieces of content–text, images, videos– from websites and then take what you’ve clipped and save it privately, share it openly, e-mail it to imported contacts or post it to your blog.

In the updated version of Yoono, clicking on a new button in the browser’s toolbar will bring up a “Buzz Note” applet, which is a pop-up screen that becomes your editing dashboard (see screenshot below). This applet deploys Grouptivity’s method and pulls all the videos and images from the site you’re browsing, lining them up as thumbnails. One click on any of the thumbnails adds the content into the Buzz Note, where there is room to jot. Grouptivity, however, limits you to e-mailing your clips. Buzz It does not; as with Clipmarks, exporting your note to your blog or MySpace profile involves a few clicks.

We’ve only seen the demo, but the applet itself is elegant and appears to be intuitive. Compared to Grouptivity’s devilish editing interface, Buzz It’s is an archangel. It offers different editing options from Clipmarks. Clipmarks lets you customize colors, and reduce the size of videos, whereas Buzz lets you do things like reposition text, edit text with formatting like italics and bold, and move photos around.

That being said, for all of Buzz It’s sharp look and feel, Clipmarks offers the most important clipping and posting functionality with a simpler interface: with Clipmarks, you don’t have to open a new window to make clips. It’s difficult to say how popular these sorts of features will become. But for people wanting an easy way to pull content from everywhere and jazz it up with editing tools for their blogs, these are companies to watch.

Note: Grouptivity plans to release a white-label version next week during Web 2.0 Expo.

updated

Grouptivity is the latest start-up that wants to let you share your views on Web content with friends or work colleagues.

Specifically, Grouptivity gives you a toolbar that lets you easily strip all of the content from any Web page, including text, images and video. It puts that content onto a clipboard, which you can then send to your friends with notations (see partial screenshot below).

The messages are called GroupMail because they can go to multiple people. It lets you add friends from your address book, or IM buddies, so that you can see if they are available to correspond with.

Grouptivity is similar to Clipmarks, another site that lets you cut and paste pieces of a Web page. However, Clipmarks forces you to go back to your email client to send the content. Grouptivity is different, because t The stripped content is automatically loaded into a form that is ready to send. [Update: Clipmarks' latest release three weeks ago makes it similar in this regard]. All you do is enter the email addresses and hit send. You can also choose a pre-selected group of friends to correspond with.

More details here. It honors copyright. If text is stripped from the Web, Grouptivity only copies the first 300 words and then provides a link to the rest of it. Same with photo and video. A thumbnail is provided, but a recipient of your message views the original media by clicking back to the original site.

Group responses are assembled into a single view, eliminating the multiple back-and-forth email messages.

Grouptivity is a subsidiary of private company, AppMail.