December 26, 2007

Kwout, A Simple Quote Tool For Bloggers

Michael Arrington

29 comments »

People who do a lot of copying of quotes from other sites are going to like Kwout, which launched yesterday. Use it to grab a quick quotation or other screen shot from a web site and embed it into a blog or other website (one click to Flickr and Tumblr).

To grab a quote, just type a URL into the Kwout home page, or use the bookmarklet when on a web page. A new window pops up that allows you to make a selection, resize the window, and grab it. Others can then easily grab the quote and embed it as well by clicking on the link below the image. Here’s an example:

Techcrunch via kwout

The tool isn’t perfect yet - resizing is clumsy, for example. Google recently released a similar tool to allow embeds of quotes from books they’ve scanned, but what Kwout has done is more widely useful. See Go2Web2 and Library Stuff for more.

Sphere It

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Comments

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Steven M. Cohen

December 26th, 2007 at 12:21 pm

Thanks for the shout out Mike. My blog is Library Stuff, not Library Thing. I hope all is well.
Michael Arrington

December 26th, 2007 at 12:22 pm

yeah…sorry about that. fixed.
damon

December 26th, 2007 at 12:39 pm

quoting via images? pretty darn dumb, crappy image, does not index, text does not scale…
Michael Arrington

December 26th, 2007 at 12:43 pm

yeah, the no-indexing is a small problem, but most people won’t care. The scaling issue needs to be fixed.
Martin Edic

December 26th, 2007 at 12:43 pm

I agree with Damon- this thing is ridiculous. Ever hear of a little thing called ‘copy and paste’?
Orli Yakuel

December 26th, 2007 at 1:11 pm

Their stronger feature is the one for Flickr and Tumblr.

I uploaded this without actually uploading..
http://flickr.com/photos/orliy1/2138614085/
I just clicked it!
damon

December 26th, 2007 at 1:15 pm

“the scaling needs to be fixed”, yeah, like use text instead of images.
Nick

December 26th, 2007 at 1:27 pm

Your text size is really small… Mike…
Tim

December 26th, 2007 at 2:02 pm

And exactly WHAT is the advantage over copy & paste or a link?
Michelle

December 26th, 2007 at 2:27 pm

It looks pretty, but yeah, I’m with the others in the whole “why can’t you just copy/paste” thing. Seems like overkill.
Solacetech

December 26th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

I understand the giving credit to who credit is due,but, This method seems to have 1 too many steps…
David G

December 26th, 2007 at 3:34 pm

I kind of like it, as you get to show a mini screenshot as well as doing a copy+paste at the same time. Its not the kind of thing I’d use a lot but it could be handy now and again.

Having said that, I just tried it and it left a big blue border round my ‘Kwout’ http://1placetoshare.blogspot......e-web.html
(not sure if thats something in my CSS? I don’t think so but I’m not a CSS expert)
Larry Kubin

December 26th, 2007 at 4:07 pm

That’s funny, me and my friend just spent a few days building something similar over the holidays. Except with ours you just install a Firefox plugin or bookmarklet, highlight the text, and right click. Ours is at SnipQuote.com. Yes, shameless plug, I know.
Jon

December 26th, 2007 at 4:32 pm

Interesting take on the “quote” sector of the web, looking forward to seeing how it gets adopted across other sites.

Jon
josiah

December 26th, 2007 at 7:50 pm

Clipmarks is the closest competitor here (and is a lot better/fully featured), I can’t believe no one has suggested it and Arrington didn’t include it in the original.

Very useful tool (with FF toolbar) for rapid blogging and “clipping”.
HeavyLight

December 26th, 2007 at 7:53 pm

I think it’ll become very useful!

I’ve put a more ‘challenging’ kwout-grab on my blog: http://normob.blogspot.com/200.....kable.html

@Larry (#13) - SnipQuote is absolutely nothing like kwout.
Matt

December 26th, 2007 at 9:54 pm

I can see what they are trying to do, but from that image, it’s not something I will be using straight away…
mojaam

December 26th, 2007 at 10:30 pm

This is for lazy folks who don’t want to use Prt Scrn with Gimp/PS/simple photo editor and write some html. It is a faster way, I’ll give it that but not really necessary.
JasonMcIntyre

December 27th, 2007 at 3:45 am

although scaling is currently an issue - this is a great tool for blogging!
paisano

December 27th, 2007 at 11:10 am

Nice try but the non-indexing and image method blows.
The best social networking quotation site is still http://www.QuotationsBook.com
Check them out!
Scoble did a nice interview with its founder which was inspiring for the future of words/quotes on the web!

Pai
David Berkowitz

December 27th, 2007 at 12:12 pm

My main problem: when taking screen shots of a site like Facebook, for example, the screen shot shows me logged out and taking a picture of the homepage. Given that a lot of the sites I need to snap require registration, the tool’s nearly useless until it’s fixed.
mathew

December 27th, 2007 at 1:04 pm

Turning quotes into unreadable unindexable un-copy-pasteable images that increase bandwidth use and slow the page down? Dumbest idea in months.
Mary

December 27th, 2007 at 4:48 pm

Thanks, you always come up with the best posts! I was inspired to blog about Kwout too, thanks to your informative post about it.
ZiZi

December 27th, 2007 at 7:10 pm

I heard they got a 5 million in funding!
Why not?
t.k.

December 27th, 2007 at 9:58 pm

The unicode support is not complete. Tried to grab a page from http://www.thorappan.com, and I see just blocks in the image.
Ultimate Diligence Blog (=^ v ^=)

December 28th, 2007 at 3:11 am

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Ultimate Diligence Blog (=^ v ^=)

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