Rumors are circulating today that ClipMarks, the social bookmarking site that could and in a smaller scale ‘did,’ may have been bought by Forbes, the news giant. VentureBeat was one of the first to report it earlier today. No rumored price has been revealed, but Michael Arrington’s price instincts — which I to agree on — say it’s likely to be no more than something in the lower millions.
ClipMarks, which is based in New York, enables you to clip things from the web — text, photos, videos, etc. — make selections, and save them to your ClipMarks folders. In a similar way to how Del.icio.us works, ClipMarks focuses more intensely on browser integration and solving the problem for online researchers and students rather than focus on getting everybody to replace their browsers’ Bookmarks.
For social bookmarking sites, it’s been all hype and no big money. Del.icio.us got bought by Yahoo! for the lower millions a couple years ago, as did Reddit by Conde Nast and ClipMarks is very likely to follow. A similarity worth noting between the acquirers is the fact that they’re all content companies — someone like Microsoft or Google, which base their innovation on technology, seem less interested in diving into the market.
If this deal follows, that leaves us to wonder what’s happening with the last usual suspect: Digg. Is Google it? Or perhaps the ad deal with Microsoft may go further? Or is the last usual suspect going to be joined by the last usual suspect, AOL? Let’s find out. 
