Soulati-'TUDE!

Clipsi is a new social collaboration tool currently in beta. I’ve been toying with it and am impressed in the earliest stages with what I see. As someone who makes a total mess of bookmarks (I do not organize), I can see how Clipsi will help me curate, collate, collaborate on a Pinterest-style or Storify-style board the content I want to reference and write about.

I’m excited for my colleague and friend, Neicole Crepeau, who is one of the founders of this awesome tool. Please ask for an invite to the beta in comments below…Neicole?

How would you describe Clipsi?

Clipsi is a collaboration tool designed for business users. It uses the Pinterest metaphor, putting extracts or clips from websites and documents onto an online bulletin board, where people can work with them and discuss them. We’re in the very early stages right now, but our product roadmap involves a slew of features to enable teams to use Clipsi boards as a tool for organizing and discussing content.

Right now, a lot of what I see on your blog is about using Clipsi for marketing. How does that fit with this collaboration idea?

We’re following the familiar model of releasing a free product to gain broad adoption, with a plan to add additional paid versions with richer features. Since user adoption is critical to a young startup with a new product, we built the free version with features that help marketers and content creators. When marketers and content creators use Clipsi to market their content, it increases awareness of Clipsi, too. So, we let people create great boards, clip from their ebooks and content, share the boards and clips broadly, and embed the boards on their own websites. We expect the free version of Clipsi will always be a useful content curation and marketing tool, while also being a useful social collaboration tool.

How can bloggers use Clipsi, then?

I think there a couple of ways. First, you can create boards for your econtent to give potential readers a “peek inside” of your book or PDF. As well as putting reviews and articles about it on the board. You can embed the boards on your book download page or in blog posts, and encourage reviewers to do the same.

Second, you can create boards to enhance a blog topic. Say you’re writing about PR versus Marketing. You could create a board with clips from PRSA documents and charters, articles on the difference, and forums where debates are happening. These days, we don’t want to make our posts too long, but a Clipsi board lets you provide information, right on your blog post, for people who want to dig deeper. And they can discuss and debate the topic more via the Clips. And, you can keep the board updated, adding new information from time to time, to keep the discussion fresh.

You have a Public Boards page and a Top Boards page. What is the difference and what is the plan for these pages?

Public boards at this point are any boards that are not private. In the free version of the product, you get one Private board (indicated by the lock icon) and that board can only be used and viewed by you. All other boards can be accessed by others and appear on the Public Boards site automatically. In the Pro version, we’ll be offering Private Team boards, where you can invite a group of users to work privately on a board.

Top Boards is a page we manually curate and that only contains boards that meet certain criteria, as outlined on this page: https://about.clipsi.com/how-to-get-on-our-top-boards-page/.

We will definitely be adding categories to both pages in the future, and you’ll be able to specify a category for your board when you create it.

Clipsi lets you curate by clipping sections of a source document or article. Doesn’t this promote more plagiarism?

We’re very concerned about plagiarism. This is fine line that any content sharing platform has to walk. Pinterest had the same challenges, Facebook, etc., which all post clips or excerpts. Like other platforms, our terms indicate that it is up to the user to be sure they are not violating a copyright.

They should ask permission if they are going to clip from a copy of someone else’s document that includes the full content, because it is viewable in our viewer. So, for example, in the case of your book, I had your permission and I removed all pages that I didn’t clip from so that your full book was not available via the viewer. Note that we also have a detailed take-down procedure. We abide by the DCMA policies and follow the procedures it outlines. Anyone who believes their copyright is being infringed can fill out our take-down request form at https://about.clipsi.com/copyright-complaint. We don’t want to encourage that.

Right now, you only allow clipping from documents in Dropbox. What if people don’t have Dropbox?

Dropbox is only the first cloud storage system for Clipsi. We picked it because it is the most widely used system. However, there are other common systems that we plan to integrate with. We have our eye on Box, for instance, as it is focused more on business users, which is our target market. But, we are a new product with a lot of features on our roadmap. So it’s one step at a time.

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