quoting with image maps

December 26, 2007 10:48 PM

Kwout, Use it to grab a quick quotation or other screen shot from a web site and embed it into a blog or other website (one click to Flickr and Tumblr).. [via/via]

When you invoke Kwout (either from their web page, or from a bookmarklet…) a medium sized screen shot is taken of the page you are quoting. You can then click and drag the cursor to highlight the section of the page you want to quote. Once you have grabbed your selection you are then taken to a page where you are presented with a number of display options. Copy the associated code and you can then paste the Kwout image map into any web page.

posted by nickyskye (20 comments total)

NOT A SNARK:
Could someone give me an example of a situation in which this would be handy? I think it's going over my head.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 10:55 PM on December 26, 2007

CitrusFreak12, the first "via" above gives an example.
posted by nickyskye at 11:00 PM on December 26, 2007

Ah, so it's like a not so annoying alternative to Snap?
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 11:11 PM on December 26, 2007

Great, I hope this integrates with Blzop and Krzm.
posted by blacklite at 11:22 PM on December 26, 2007 [7 favorites]

nickyskye:

The first link does give a demo, but not an example of a real-world use. I rarely need to post images of website navigation into my blog with working links. I agree with CitrusFreak12 in my inability to come up with a particularly good reason to use this. And I really would prefer people actually quote text as text for the sake of readability/searchability/etceterability...

I must admit, though, that it looks like a clever little hack.
posted by chasing at 11:31 PM on December 26, 2007

It seems useful for sites trying to show inaccurate combinations of words and photos on other sites. For example, if Fox News ran a photo of a congressmen with the wrong party's name underneath, this would be much more useful than simply linking to the page on Fox News, since the page could be changed or removed.
posted by null terminated at 11:54 PM on December 26, 2007

I guess generally it's useful when commenting about other sites. "Look at this great new design!".

It's basically an alternative to print screen, open photoshop, crop, save for web, upload and I can see myself using it.
posted by null terminated at 11:57 PM on December 26, 2007

this is going to come in very handy for my new website, where I will troll Metafilter to find posts I strongly disagree with, take pictures of them and post them on my own website at pictures and make snarky comments that no one will read. Very handy. Very, very handy. Mwa ha ha ha
posted by parmanparman at 1:19 AM on December 27, 2007 [4 favorites]

It seems useful for showing a visual representation of what you want to quote as opposed to taking a screenshot, uploading the screenshot to webserver, then making a link to that screenshot. Cuts down on the number of steps.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:16 AM on December 27, 2007

When you invoke Kwout (either from their web page, or from a bookmarklet…) a medium sized screen shot is taken of the page you are quoting.

I tried invoking it the traditional way: Lots of sacrifices and chanting "Kwout, kwout, kwout" but it didn't work. No backwards compatibility for Web 2.0
posted by ersatz at 5:01 AM on December 27, 2007

The competing service, Kw00t, only works in online games, but it does show an embedded video of your character getting fragged.

Seriously, when are the domain parking asses going to be banned so that we can have websites with pronounceable names again?
posted by caution live frogs at 5:21 AM on December 27, 2007

And for those times when all you really need to quote are the words from a website, we're happy to announce Cutnpst Beta, which takes a snapshot of the text you wish to copy, saves it on our servers, and then presents itself through our embedded code into a variety of IntarBlog2.0(TM) formats, complete with amusing rounded-corner quotation mark graphics and a dynamically synergetic ad served underneath. But it'll look for all the world as if you typed it in yourself!
posted by Spatch at 5:24 AM on December 27, 2007

It's missing one important feature, the ability to annotate the image.* Which is kind of funny since the screen shots on the kwout home page are annotated with red circles. (Which is something I often do.) Talk about not eating your own dog food.

*or did I miss that?
posted by sexymofo at 6:12 AM on December 27, 2007

I take it it's meant to be pronounced "quote", but it looks like it rhymes with "trout".
posted by Hildegarde at 6:43 AM on December 27, 2007

And I really would prefer people actually quote text as text for the sake of readability/searchability/etceterability...

And plain old quotability.

Or maybe that's Kwout's master plan ...

Soon every blog will be racing toward singularity as Kwouters quote Kwouters who quote Kwouters.

"Hat tip: that pixelated smudge thirteen iterations deep."
posted by mph at 8:35 AM on December 27, 2007

A huge problem is that they're using JPG, which will always look bad with text. The images should really be either PNG or broken into PNG and jpg.
posted by delmoi at 9:03 AM on December 27, 2007

I wish this meant we could have pix again in MeFi, but I know better.
posted by pax digita at 9:16 AM on December 27, 2007

It's a neat solution, but I'm always wary of tools that allow the uninformed to easily convert text (Which can be highlighted, cut & pasted) to badly compressed images.
Unless those tools allow me to convert Access into Excel. ;-)

Add to this the fact that many websites won't allow you to screenshot the page (because you're not logged in) and this becomes stops being useful for an irritating percentage of uses.

Finally, the bandwidth they're using to provide what is basically a screen-printing facility means that the service is never going to provide them with any huge amount of profit. I can't see them staying open for long.
posted by seanyboy at 9:42 AM on December 27, 2007

obligatory commentary by the boys at uncov. not that i necessarily agree but it is timely.
posted by casconed at 9:42 AM on December 27, 2007

chasing, in my comment I said the first "via" above gives an example, not the first link.

Another example, another, another.

I think one of the advantages with Kwout is that it's not just a cut and paste, the hyperlinks remain active when the capture is moved to your blog/elsewhere.
posted by nickyskye at 9:59 AM on December 27, 2007 [1 favorite]