Once the browser plugin is installed, Clipmarks is fairly simple to use. You press the clip button and enter into clipping mode, which causes a tool bar to appear above the page you're viewing. Mousing around the page causes orange outlines to appear around various piece of the page, clicking "clips" that bit of the page. Clicking again "unclips" that portion of the page. When you're done, you click "Save" on the toolbar, which pops up a window with your clip that lets you name your clip, tag it, add a description, add it to a collection (categorize), and share it with the public (including directly to del.icio.us).

Clipmarks is smart enough to recognize some types of media embedded within pages, such as YouTube videos, which it can snip out of the page without much hassle. Other types of media, however, it had a bit more trouble with (i.e., it couldn't seem to isolate logos on pags that were used as background images).

Clipmarks also includes a social aspect, with its shared clips. The Clipmarks website lets you vote on public clips using a Digg-style system, make comments on clips, and follow the clipping of your friends. Clipmarks also produces Clipiversity, a daily video blog of fun things found on Clipmarks (kind of like Diggnation is for Digg).

Web-Chops works in more or less the same manner, except the outline around your chops is blue, and it doesn't recognize media like videos as well as Clipmarks. There are two major differences in the way Web-Chops works versus Clipmarks. The first is that you can only save one snippet at a time, rather than clipping out small pieces from around a page and assembling them into a single clip.

The other major difference is in how chops are saved. Web-Chops saves chops onto a grid, that lets you lay them out in any way you want. Say you chop photos of Tiger Woods, you could then lay them out on your grid chronologically according when they were taken. I actually found this method a bit more clumsy than Clipmarks, but it does give you a way to visually lay out the snippets you save in a way that makes sense to you, rather than just in the order you saved them.

Web-Chops has some rudimentary social features. They let you search publicly shared clips and share clips directly with your buddies. But they don't make it very easy to locate public clips (there was no browse feature that I could find, just a search box). The service does, however, let you annotate clips on your grid (i.e., add blocks of text describing the clip -- or saying anything you want), so I noticed some people using Web-Chops to create messages for friends with chopped articles, photos and videos.

Conclusion

Both of these services are potentially useful by allowing you to easily save the relevant part of a website, without saving all the fluff around it. But they are not without their drawbacks. Clipmarks has a few annoying quirks, namely that once you've clicked the save button, you can't delete pieces of your clip -- if you made a mistake you have to start over, and that it organizes your clip by the order you clicked on each piece (and you can't change the order). Further, both services would be more useful if you could highlight specific pieces of a website, rather than only what it identifies as clips. A number of times with each service I wanted to save a specific paragraph, only to find that it hadn't identified that paragraph, or had lumped it together with stuff I didn't want. You also can't save a single sentence from the middle of a block of text.