widgetBeat…

Clip it and widge it

March 26th, 2008

by Al Merkrebs, March 26, 2008 @ 5:15 p.m. PDT

If you’re like me, you like to copy and paste. As a blogger, I’d like to share my clippings effortlessly, including those with multimedia content.

With the ClipCast widget from Clipmarks, you’re on the path to this ideal. The learning curve is steep and can take some time, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a good shortcut for clipping and sharing.

To use this widget, you’ll need to install their “Clip mode” button to your browser’s toolbar and put their widget on your site.

Then, when you are back to browsing online and see something you want to clip and share, click the “Clip mode” button on your browser’s toolbar to access the Clipmarks clipping tools. Once you’ve clipped something (text, pictures, video), you’ll have the option of saving it to your ClipCast widget or posting the ClipCast to your blog.

Voila! Your readers are now seeing what you deem as clip-worthy.

You can see a sample of ClipCast as a blog post, down below. Please make sure you also look at ClipCast as a widget, located in our right sidebar at the very bottom.

Pros:

• The widget itself is chock-full of neat interactive tools:
  • Add comments to clips
  • View clips with a slide-show button
  • View clips in auto-play mode
  • Vote for clips you like
• The widget supports links and plays any video in a clip.

Cons:

• My widget version is 200 pixels wide, which makes the back-arrow disappear. That means once you’ve cycled through all the clips, there’s no going back to the beginning without a screen refresh. Ouch!
• The actual clipping of content itself can be very clunky until you get the hang of it.
• The essential Clip mode button is only supported on IE, Firefox and Flock. Opera users are out of luck.
• The Clipmarks online clip management system can be hard to figure out, e.g. I wanted to delete a second ClipCast I had made and I still can’t figure out how to do that.
• You can’t select which of the ClipCast’s interactive tools are shown on the screen; all are always shown.

Engine required: None, but you need to install Clickmarks’ “Clip mode” button, and then embed the code for the widget.

Entry Filed under: widget reviews