Hot on the heels of a post earlier in the week looking at webclipping tools, I get notification of two more web clipping services – MemCatch and Diigo. Both carry out the same tasks of clipping full web pages,highlighted areas of text etc from net-based information sources and storing it for later use. Storing, filing, filtering and sorting of information is carried by tagging and, because the nature of the web is turning collaborative, information can be shared among selected individuals or released into the wild form all to see.
MemCatch describes itself as a social knowledge network and slits its knowledge base into three – personal knowledge, group knowledge and open knowledge and clipped data. Data is kept in bins and as the site explains: "Knowledge Bins are groupings of knowledge bits that together form your knowledge base. Knowledge bins can be personal, group-oriented, or set up as open knowledge. Open knowledge is viewable by everyone and anyone can join those groups, but it is a great way for you to contribute your knowledge to the general public and to build a reputation for knowledge in a particular area."
Access to knowledge bins is controlled by the manager – i.e, whoever normally sets up the account – and individuals are invited to share information by email. Participants can amend and add to the clips. Data is taken from web content by the Grab to MemCatch button placed on the navigation bar. This brings up a bar with the URL of the site you are clipping, buttons to visit the link or do a keyword search within the site and a scissor icon which you press if you want to clip the page. This then brings up a dialogue box which allows you to choose which bin you want to deposit the clip, the facility to start a new bin and filing aids such as tagging, notes etc.
Once established the data can be edited and a full list of revisions are stored for reference. There is also a broadcast option which sends an email to individual bin participants.
One final word from the site: Where does "MemCatch" come from? MemCatch doesn’t actually come from "memory catch" as many people have suggested, although that would probably fit as well. MemCatch comes from the concept of being able to catch "memes". Memes are ideas that want to spread far and wide because of the low cost to distribute them, enriching everything they touch.
Diigo – pronounced dee-go – has a slightly more complex approach with the ability to put a dedicated toolbar into your browser – there is also a right click menu and a small navigation bar Diigolet applet if you don’t want a whole new toolbar clogging up your real estate – and it has a few more bells and whistles. Like MemCatch you can use Diigo to store information for your personal use but it is a public knowledge networking tool that it really scores. As well as a private library you can store data from people you want to follow in the My Network module or form groups to which you can invite individuals and keep them separate. These act in much the same way as the bins in MemCatch.
There is also a community module where posts from all Diigo users are shown
One neat trick is that when you highlight a portion of text you cannot only save it as a clip but you can send it to Twitter! This only works with the full Diigo bar and not the Diigolet.
Inside your library there are more options and features which shows how deeply the design and concept of Diigo is. There is a more actions drop down menu which allows you to publish the tick boxed clips to your blog, convert it from private to public viewing and vice versa, delete any of the clippings and generate a report which loads the marked clips into a small word processing module to which you can add your own words and then cut and paste into Word or Google Docs for distribution. There does not seem to be any way of saving the work within the module in a native or exported format.
To be fair when comparing the two services is more established where as MemCatch has only been out in the wild since last month
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