He/she may want to quickly grasp the idea on what the page is all about and why you have shared the link with him. He may not like reading long paragraphs of introduction and may quit reading the page altogether. If you want to share snippets of content from a webpage, you need a smart note making tool at your disposal. Note making tools are different from bookmarking tools – you can select particular portions of a webpage, store it in your account and then share it with anyone. The advantage of using a note tool is that you can customize the snippet as you like and it works really fast ! There are quite a few browser extensions and desktop software available for note making but I recommend using a web based tool for two reasons. The first reason is that you don’t have to download or install anything. Secondly, you can use the web interface to capture content from any computer, customize it and share it with anyone.
Capture Snippets of Content Using Memonic
First, go to the Memonic website and sign up for a free account. There are 4 different ways to capture snippets of content from the web using Memonic. Let’s see each of them in full detail:
- Capture Content using the Memonic Bookmarklet: Drag and drop the memonic bookmarklet in your bookmarks toolbar
Now when you want to capture snippets from a webpage, hit the bookmarklet and memonic will let you select portions of the webpage as shown below:
You can also add a Title and description to your snippet using the “Save this URL” button placed adjacent to the “Save Snippet” button. Entering a Title and description will be useful when you want to know from which webpage you have saved the snippet.
After you have saved your snippet, go to your Memonic inbox and you will see the snippet listed as a new item
You can perform a lot of activities with your items from the Memonic inbox. This includes sharing your items with anyone on Facebook or Twitter, adding items to sets or groups, editing permissions and lots more. We will see all those options but first lets learn other ways of capturing snippets using Memonic. 2. Capture Content From a URL: If you don’t want to use any browser bookmarklet, you can use the “Paste URL’ text box within your Memonic account. Simply paste the URL of the webpage from where you would want to save snippets and Memonic will open the page for you. Now click on “Start Clipping”, select the portion of the page you want to save and hit “Save as”. The snippet from the webpage will be saved as a new item in your Memonic Inbox.
- Save a Web Snippet From Your Email This is my favorite way of saving snippets in Memonic inbox. Consider a situation: You are reading a webpage and want to save multiple paragraphs containing text and images as a new item in your Memonic inbox. You don’t want to login to Memonic or use the browser bookmarklet. In such cases, you can simply compose a new email and paste the text part to be saved as a snippet. Then attach all the images as email attachments and send the email to post@memonic.com
Your email message will be converted into a clip and all the images will be attached to the clip. This feature will be useful when you want to share an email conversation with some of your friends. Just forward the email to post@memonic.com, save it as a clip and share the entire email message with whoever you want. 4. Compose a Clip From Memonic Dashboard If you want to compose and save a customized clip, login to your Memonic account and go to New -> Compose. You will be shown a WYSIWYG editor where you can compose a clip, paste text from various sources, add links and images from a web URL and save it in your Memonic account.
This feature will be useful when you want to customize paragraphs from different sources and aggregate stuff at one place.
Managing your Web Clippings
Creating web clippings is just half the work done, you should also know how to manage and organize your notes and clippings. Memonic lets you create sets which acts just like Email labels, you can move multiple clippings to create a set. To create a “Set”, all you have to do is click the small “Plus” icon from the sidebar and enter a name for your set. Then select the desired clips from your Memonic inbox and drag and drop them in the created set.
Memonic gives you an embed code for the created set and thus you can embed the clippings on your blog or website. The set can be made public or private and you can also share a set via Email, Facebook or Twitter.
The groups tab lets you add collaborators to your sets, you can invite your friends to join Memonic and contribute to your collection. This is very useful, you can add multiple peoples to a set and all of them can add bits of information at one place. There are tools like Evernote and Google Notebook but I think Memonic is a much simpler option. The free account lets you store up to 100 notes, if you want more you can upgrade to a premium plan any day. What’s your take on Memonic? If you think this tool is useful, please lets us know your thoughts through a comment.
