VentureBeat is reporting that Forbes Magazine is acquiring web bookmarking service Clipmarks.

It looks like the truth of the matter is a bit more complicated. Clipmarks CEO Eric Goldstein "clipmarked" the story himself and left some comments.

In a nutshell, Clipmarks has been in talks with Forbes and other companies about financial backing for the site. It does seem like a Forbes deal could be in the works, but Goldstein describes the VentureBeat article as "premature."

The odd thing about all of this is that Forbes is reportedly interested in buying the service because Forbes reporters use it to organize and share information. Eventually you could see Clipmarks used in articles at Forbes' web site. But do they really need to buy the company to do that?

It's fairly inarguable that Firefox needs to exist. Going back just a few years ago to when Mozilla introduced what would quickly become their flagship browser, much of the internet was in the equivalent of the digital dark ages. Netscape was struggling along after Internet Explorer had successfully derailed its efforts years ago, but even IE was suffering from a stagnating development process and an industry that was trying to move forward with efforts in standards and compatibility. Sure, Opera was always on the outer fringes, but its market share hasn't really seen much of the leap that its devoted following believes it deserves.

Along comes Firefox in 2004, and everything changes. Netscape drops even farther off the list of many a user, and Internet Explorer begins slowly, but steadily, losing market share to the open source Mozilla alternative that opened up the public's eye to the wonders of extensions and add-ons. It is at this moment in time, however, when Firefox also began to slowly replace Internet Explorer as a dominant and, in some ways, proprietary force on the web.

In 2007, Firefox certainly hasn't destroyed IE's market share, but it sure has made a dent. While that's a positive thing in the name of choice and the triumph of good software, Firefox has quite possibly made a negative impact on the development of web sites and software when viewed in the context of accessibility. Think about it: before Firefox, most websites were not only 'optimized' for IE, you pretty much had to view them in IE if you wanted to see anything more than the equivalent of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle blown apart with a shotgun. Even though it could be argued that web design standards have come quite a ways since then (and they certainly have), the damage done from Firefox's wild popularity among the tech savvy (and even not-so-savvy) primarily lies in this new frontier of web apps and services.

We mentioned Clipmarks way back in 2005 when we first discovered them, and thanks to a recent Vox update, we noticed the web clipping service just released a major new 2.0 upgrade.

On the surface, the site has received a complete redesign, featuring a sexy new layout and a live clippings monitor for public clips. The goodness, however, is far more than skin deep. There are three major new clipping features that should be a big boost to an already slick clipping service. The most significant is the ability to clip videos from YouTube and other video communities. The second major new feature is Clip-to-Blog which, as its name implies, allows you to instantly blog any of your clippings to a compatible blog service or platform. Hence the tip-off from Vox, since it's on the list.


The final major enhancement (but probably not the last on the list) is a new control bar that acts as a dashboard for taking action with/to your clippings. This is a rocking new feature that really adds some power to how you use Clipmarks and the things you store with the site.

Altogether, the new Clipmarks is a pretty impressive 2.0 upgrade, especially for a web 2.0 site.

While we've featured similar tools in the past (like ScrapBook), Clipmarks is a tool that saves snippets of web pages that has the distinction of storing them online. While there's danger inherent in trusting services that keep your data on a remote server, Clipmarks's value exceeds (for some) that of ScrapBook and others because it's a social service. Like del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites, you can make your Clipmarks public and you can search others' clippings. In order to "clip" web sites you have to install a Firefox extension which you can use in a number of ways. Check out the demo on the Clipmarks to get a better idea of how it works.

[Thanks, Kesey!]