Clipping and annotating seems to be an area of exploration on the Internet, especially come Web 2.0. We’ve been seeing a growth in services that enable instant content clipping, annotating, scrapping, and any word you can attach -ing to make it sound easy and appealing (i.e. chopping). Web-Chops, which launched yesterday, is one that lets you clip web content and insert them into your own ‘Personal Topic Page.’
The idea behind Web-Chops is to combine social annotating with social networking and search. Users download an extension for their preferred web browser which adds a Web-Chops button and lets you select content to annotate upon being clicked on. The content is added to a personal topic page of the user, which he or she can then choose to share with friends or make public.
As users create the topic pages, a searchable database of ‘topics’ is built for everyone to chop through (no pun intended). The clippings are presented in an AJAXy bulletin board-like format. It’s currently a personal project by Israel-based Nir Halutzy.
Opinion
To be recognized player these days, it seems that you either have to be first or different at doing something — being good or great just doesn’t cut it. Unfortunately, Web-Chops is one of those services. It’s great at what it does, but the idea has been repeated in one way or another in so many ways that being ‘another one’ doesn’t cut it. However, Web-Chops is fairly high on the cool-factor and features some neat things that make it worth trying it out.
