This week I have added two services to this site and one to Firefox. What they have in common is an alleged ability to make my life simpler by linking things together and saving me work.

Sphere

The first is the most immediately useful Sphere provides a WordPress plug-in that puts a link at the bottom of every post longer than thirty words. If someone reading the post clicks on it then a pop-up window will show a list of more-or-less related items from around the web. This collection is derived from the tags on the post, and (I think) from the post’s actual content.

Whether or not it is any use to my mainly-theoretical readers, it is useful to me. I have already found some interesting links I would never otherwise have seen by clicking on the Sphere logo at the bottom of some of my own posts.

coComment

The second is coComment. This does several related things. You sign up for a free account and install a browser plug-in. Thereafter, whenever you make a comment in a comment field on a blog or site the thread you are commenting on is tracked in your coComment profile. So all your comments get stored in one place where you can go and follow the threads.

Then, of course, like Flickr and deli.icio.us and others, you can search other people’s public conversations, mark them with tags, see top ten lists of topics, commenters and so on.

There is also a related WordPress plug-in which attaches a set of coComment links to the bottom of my comment boxes. This enables anyone else who comments here to instantly create a guest coComment account and track the thread. Using one of these somewhere else on the web was, in fact, how I found out about coComment in the first place.

Clipmarks

I am slightly less convinced about Clipmarks, not because I think it is a bad idea but because I am not certain how useful I personally will find it. The idea is simple and powerful – and fits right into my current thoughts about micro-content. But then so is del.icio.us, and the sad truth is that I have an account but I hardly use it.

With Clipmarks, you create a free account, and install a Firefox plug-in. Then you can use the plug-in to clip parts of a page (up to 1,000 characters in fact), and save it to your account, or post it directly to your blog, or both. The clips in your account can, of course, be given tags, and you can see top ten lists of topics, clippers and so on.

My suspicion is that, for me, the account page will languish almost unused but the straight-to-blog idea might be very useful. I have tested it and it works very smoothly. It allows a comment to be added before or after a clipping, and it allows you to remove any inline styles in the clipping before it is posted. It does not, however, allow you to specify a category.

Fortunately I have had an Uncategorised default category, which had no practical use. I have now renamed it Clippings, and made it a child of the Observations main category. This means that any clippings should automatically drop into the right place in the site layout.

Now to see if it turn out to be a useful part of the regular data gathering process for my memi. If it does then slightly less convinced may yet flip into hopelessly addicted…