Many bloggers could benefit from using a splendid new tool called citebite (found via. Lifehacker). It’s probably easiest for you to just go and have a look, but for the sake of completeness, here’s what it does.
You copy and paste a chunk of text from a web page you want to quote. Then you tell it which URL it came from. It returns a link which will take your readers to the exact place in the site, with the quotation highlighted.
For example, try this link. Kathy Sierra says jargon is about efficiency. It will take you right here:
One caveat about the service. The link and Google Juice goes to citebite, not the site you’re linking to. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it doesn’t generate a trackback either. If you want to be nice to your fellow bloggers, it’s probably best to include a traditional link as well.
Nonetheless, it seems very handy indeed if you want to write about bits of a long document or post and save your readers time searching for your citations. Citebite also offer the choice of a Firefox extension or a bookmarklet to accelerate the creation of these links.
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Hi Ian — I tried the link but got a standard error page. Perhaps their site is down under stress of traffic from your blog…!
Ermm… it could be that ;)
Clearly, it’s still pretty beta and they’ve broken it for a spell.
Working now!
“The link and Google Juice goes to citebite, not the site you’re linking to.”
For this reason, I won’t be using the service. i want the site I’m linking to to get all of the users and Google juice. Also, I worry about what will happen when CiteBite goes down, or disappears entirely.
Seems useful to me for linking to longer features or articles in mainstream media, and I’m not too worried about not giving them link juice. Just a shame that it gives an error on the IE7 toolbar — I’m one of those that thinks IE7 is far better than Firefox (which I now only use for techy type stuff).
With you entirely on those things. Hopefully, the citebite people are listening to this conversation, Stuart, and will chime in about the bookmarklet. (or even better fix it — joining the conversation is one thing — getting stuff done is on another plane).
Works wonderfully in Firefox and even has a keyboard shortcut…
The Citebite people are listening in and today we launched a new version of the bookmarklet that works with IE6/7.
Go and get it here:
http://www.citebite.com/bookmarklet
Citebite is down again :( The strange thing with it that they didn’t mention any validity date of the link.. so the database may crash at any time,.. it seems that now = anytime :)
Did anyone recommends an alternative of it?
Citebite is up again. Sorry, but we are experiencing some problems after having moved the app to a new host, hence the downtime. However, only the app is down–not the linked pages created by the app. Linked pages are served directly from Amazon S3 and so they should be near-bulletproof.
Argh! those revenue-obsessed idi*ts!!. You miss the point altogether about one of the strongest points for Citebite: it creates a CACHED COPY of the content, on Citebite´s servers.
It´s very useful to highlight errors, omissions, or articles that are later edited or removed altogether, ie to preserve those for posterity.
FC