Amplify: Trying a new microclippnig service

I have tried various ways to record links (bookmarks, etc.) and have them displayed on my blogs.

I used Delicious for a long while, but it seemed too disconnected from blogging. A few months ago, I started to use Tumblr and created messagelinks.tumblr.com and groundlinks.tumblr.com. However, they aren’t really like other tumblr blogs, because their content is almost exclusively links, and the principal way that I expect people to interact with them is via a sidebar on the corresponding long-format blog, /message or /ground, respectively. There are also a short list of annoying feature glitches in this use case, although I love Tumblr for other purposes, like my ambivalence.tumblr.com blog.

So, today I stumbled across Amplify (thanks @cleverclogs), which seems pretty much perfectly designed to be a clipblog. I have started fooling with it, and have set up messageclips.amplify.com and groundclips.amplify.com. I am presenting the RSS from /messageclips in the margin.

The app is built on top of WordPress, and feels like a real blogging tool:

I have installed the Firefox plugin, so I can easily add links with fragments from various source on the web by bookmarklet, although the UI may take a while to get used to:

• There seems to be no way to select a big chunk of text on a page: you have to pick a paragraph at a time.
• The clipped text, once added to the post, can’t be edited like other text. Grrr. So I can’t append another paragraph from the story, or edit out a sentence.

On the other hand, it is easy for me and other users of Amplify to reclip posts, but there is no Tumblr style ‘follow’ semantics going on.

Comments are supported on every clip, and RSS feeds are provided.

The integration with Twitter is simple, although they do not provide the means to edit the message in its entirety: all you can do is add character to the start of the message, which is kind of dumb. They also are providing their own URLs, unshortened, which is a drag, since I would like to use Bit.ly and get the benefit of having a single repository of link information. Until they fix these glitches, I think I will post manually to Twitter by creating a bit.ly, instead.

I haven’t found a way to import my existing Tumblr posts into Amplify, so I will just switch over. Old /messagelinks Tumblr blog is still up, if you need something there.

I will update you on how the system works after a few days.

This post originally appeared at Stowe Boyd’s /Message.