How often do you find something on a Web site somewhere that you want to send to a friend or post to Twitter or to your blog or maybe just want to record for future reference?
While there are scores of screenshot and Web page citation or clipping utilities available but there’s one service that does both and is, by far, the most useful that I’ve found: Kwout (presumably intended to by pronounced “quote”) which is published, for free, by Japan-based Heartrails.
Kwout allows you to select part of a Web page, the visible part of a Web page, or an entire Web page (i.e. both the visible and invisible areas) and then save the image locally, post it directly to social networking services such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, publish it on your Web site, send it by e-mail, edit it using either Any Canvas or Pixlr, or add a video comment to the image using the embedded Flash-based video capture service Recordr (also published by Heartrails).
What’s really clever is that you can optionally have Kwout add an image map to the capture image that makes all of the links in the image actually work!
Other options include adding a border, rounded corners, or a drop shadow to the image and or change the background color (it will default to the original page’s color).
When you sign in using OpenAuth you can access your history page which lists all of the Web images you’ve saved. From here you can change all of the options, re-post to social networking services and blogs, and perform any of the editing or annotation options.
Kwout Anywhere is another feature that allows you to embed a widget on a Web page that shows the images you’ve captured using Kwout.
Kwout is available as a Firefox 3+ plugin (it provides a context, or right-click, menu option) or as a boomarklet that works under all of the major browsers (a Chrome extension is also under development). There’s even iKwout available, which is kwout for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Kwout also offers an API that supports adding a “Quote this” button to your Web site so that a visitor can generate an image of either part or all of a page. Alternatively you can use a GET request to automate the selection process by predefining the area to quote using an XPath definition.
Kwout has that touch of genius in that it makes the task and process of clipping and citing Web content easy and flexible. If you find a better service, let me know because this is the best so far.
