Remembering the essence of a clipmark part II

I recently posted a clipmark about this issue and wanted to follow up based on the responses it received.  It seems clear that there are 2 distinct reasons for clipping.  One is for personal archiving and the second is for sharing with the community.  Sometimes both of these come into play with a clip and sometimes only one does.

My vision for clipmarks has always been to create a global information exchange where people can come to get the best bits of information about any topic and discuss those that interest them.  Rather than relying on computers to determine the best bits of information, we try to empower people with tools to determine that individually and collectively.  If it works perfectly, the collective act of people clipping things they find worthy as well as the community popping the ones they too deem clipworthy will create a very meaningful social media destination for people to enjoyably consume information about all sorts of topics they may not otherwise have time for (and meet interesting people in the process).

In order to accomlish this I believe that clips need to be relatively short and too the point.  When a clipmark is too long, i find that it breaks the flow of toggling through the information available on the site.  I suppose that if you look at each clip as an individual piece of content it really isn't a problem if it's long.  But I look at the aggregate of all clips posted on the site as creating a new type of media experience that enables the consumption of content to be entertaining as well as informative

This may sound corny, but i think the global collection of clipmarks posted publicly creates a symphony of information as opposed to each clip on its own being a solo performer.

I certainly don't want to deprive anyone of the ability to use clipmarks for personal archiving purposes.  But i feel very passionate about trying to preserve the essence of clipmarks for all people (those who clip and those who just want to come to the site to enjoy the clips that others create) and feel that we need to somehow develop a culture of clipping that puts greater focus on clipping the "sweetspot" of a page.

As always, i'm very interested in hearing your feedback and suggestions.

eric

Comments

[ghiberti]

Having recently clipped an article from way back in early 2006 I'm curious to understand what the patterns of clipping are - i.e. are most articles from clipped within a week of them being published?

Clearly this is not an area that you guys need to provide guidance on but this seemed a nice place to ask the question.

[Josh]

good work...