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06/10: ClipClip.org - Caution Required

I got home this evening to see a pingback on one of my sites from Lucia at BigBucksBogger. Imagine my concern when I read her post about ClipClip.org and realized she was talking about a group at the social bookmarking site that belonged to me.

If you are not familiar with the site, it is a social bookmarking idea that enables users to not only bookmark and share a URL but to make a "clip" of the site for viewing by other users. This is a neat idea on the face of it, but, as I have found out, it is also flawed, and if you read Lucia's post you will see why.

The problem is that when a user "clips" a site, there is no limit to what they can select - this would be fine if all the clip amounted to was a screen capture or  "photograph" of the page, but it isn't. Whatever users clip, is then stored on ClipClip's servers as an exact copy of the page in question, including live links. Lucia's concerns were twofold - Google duplicate content penalties and copyright issues.

Whilst I'm not sure how Google would view this, their behavior of late has been rather unfathomable so nobody can discount the fact that it could indeed affect not only visible page rank but also SERPS.  The copyright issue is a valid one, because although it might not be the user's intention to steal content, duplicate it or claim it as their own, it does allow third parties to copy a site's content onto another server.

In my case, I removed all the clips I had stored with the company as soon as Lucia flagged it. Like most social bookmarkers, I was just spreading the word about sites I like and visit often with the aim of promoting them to a wider audience and bringing them more traffic. In other words, thinking of it along the same lines as Stumbleupon or Simpy or NetVouz etc etc. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions!

If you are a ClipClip user, the best advice I can think of at present is this. Bookmark without making a clip (which kind of defeats the object) or, make sure that when you clip a website or blog, only clip a very small part of it, just to give people an idea of what they can expect to see if they visit. Sometimes it is not easy to do this because the selection tool is not always very accurate. However, if you clip a large section of a page, you could find yourself a bit embarrassed, just as I did on this occasion. I think the owners of the site really need to look at changing how the whole clipping of pages works  - enabling people to capture a thumbnail or screenshot would be far less likely to cause anyone a problem. How they can achieve this I've no idea, but I think they need to change the way the program works, because as it stands, my few clips could be just the tip of the iceberg and unwitting users could be doing more harm than good.

TCH