[Errors and Omissions Dept: I forgot to include the URL of Dropbox in the last newsletter. It isn't what you would assume but rather http://www.getdropbox.com. Sorry for any inconvenience.]

Humans are extremely visual animals and phenomenally good at matching patterns. Therefore it follows that if you want to engage your audience, get your message across quickly, or make something memorable, using a graphical technique is going to be far more effective than text or sound.

Today’s focus, Sazell, is a service that gives you the ability to take a ‘snapshot’ of anything graphical on the Web and then archive it as well as embed it as a visual link in blogs, Web sites, and e-mail messages.

You can create a Sazell snapshot in four ways:
1. Enter the data in a form on the Sazell Web site.
2. Have Sazell retrieve images automatically from a URL.
3. Use a Google Toolbar button.
4. Use a bookmarklet (a link that uses JavaScript) in your browser link bar.
When you use the latter two options any highlighted text will be incorporated into your snapshot entry as a description.

Your snapshots are listed in your account where you can make them private; see how many times each has been viewed; see how many comments it has gathered from users; and see the average rating given by other users.

Sazell provides two types of Flash-based widget for embedding: One that shows large thumbnails in a horizontal format and another that shows small thumbnails in a vertical format. You can scroll through the thumbnails and clicking on one takes you to the snapshot’s page on Sazell. From there you can jump to the page the snapshot was taken from. Snapshots can also be posted to Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Newsvine, and Diigo directly from the Sazell interface.

Your snapshot stream can be published via a custom RSS feed and you can subscribe through your Sazell account to the snapshot streams of other Sazell users.

Sazell is a cool idea, but there are a few of things that I’d like to see fixed. First, taking a snapshot isn’t quick enough. Sazell makes you fill in the various fields on the snapshot form when you create one which takes too long if you’re busy and moving fast.

Second, when you click on a snapshot link you’re taken to a Sazell page for that particular snapshot. I’d like to see a less intrusive presentation – perhaps when a snapshot link is clicked the Sazell page is inserted on top of the target site as a banner (a la Google’s technique with “Cached” pages).

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.