Neat Linking Trick

UPDATE: After posting this, I realized the link is not to the publisher's page but to a cached page. That's not right for a bunch of reasons.So while I am not taking this post down, I am going to uninstall the extension from my browser.
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My friend Steve sent me a link to this service called Cite Bite. If you want to link to the exact phrase in a post instead of the post itself, you can use Cite Bite.

There's a bookmarklet and a Firefox extension that make Cite Bite an option when you copy a chunk of text. Very cool.

Here's a link to Terry Semel's quote about Panama in the NY Times story about Yahoo!'s earnings call.

Comments

[jw]

this is awesome and heaven sent!

thx for the tip.

[Alex Iskold]

What about this implementation that you prefer to, say, Clipmarks?

Alex

[Sam Sethi]

I like this idea as often I point to a page when often all it is, is a paragraph or quote.

I agree a cached page is odd but it does have the real url at the top. I wil ltry it out for a few days to see the reaction.

[Dharmesh Shah]

Although this is all well and good (and useful), there is relatively big impact on the search engines.

For example, part of the how search engines determine the context of a site is to figure out outbound links and the anchor text for those links. These types of "smarter" links will all point to a single site (who gets all the SEO credit) and it doesn't tell Google much of anything.

Not sure if this point has already been discussed yet or not, so I thought I'd bring it up.

[Ranjit Padmanabhan]

Admittedly self-serving, but... we run a similar service at DashNote. We annotate web page by region and are not limited to a single snippet of text.

Here's the snapshot of the Semel reference: http://dashnote.com/snapshot/o*drXUMUhJ8

Check out the home page for examples and the DashNote Weblog for conceptual background and ideas on using this sort of tool for "Rich Bookmarking" where you can reference some anchor text (as Sam Sethi has mentioned).

[Peter]

that is seriously cool.

[apseek]

This is useful..thanks for the time-saving tip!

[Ranjit Padmanabhan]

Fred, could you provide further insight into your comment "After posting this, I realized the link is not to the publisher's page but to a cached page. That's not right for a bunch of reasons"?

From a technical perspective, the less "invasive" the technology (e.g. bookmarklet or browser extension), the more externalized the control of content must move. Of course, that's a technical issue. In terms of legality, the law has generally come out in favor of "fair use with proper disclaimers", e.g. the Google Cache case.

Are the issues you allude to IP-related? Or the lack of transparency?

[Boris]

Also check out Fleck.com. Similar but cooler..!