In the old days, we suffered from information overload from the flood of newspapers and magazines that we never had time to finish reading. Rather than having to wade through all of those publications ourselves, we could hire clipping services that would scan newspapers and magazines for articles on specific topics and then send those clippings to us for a fee. Such services filtered out news so we could focus only on the information we wanted.
Nowadays, information overload comes not only from newspapers and magazines, but from Internet sites as well. With the Internet, you can retrieve information almost in real time—including stock market data, sports scores, traffic updates, and headline news flashes.
One way to keep up with rapidly changing information is to load various web pages and glance at them periodically, at your convenience. But you may want to view only part of a web page and not the entire thing—for example, if you're tracking baseball scores, you may want to watch only the scores of the New York Yankees or the Los Angeles Dodgers, but not the scores of any other teams.
To view only the part of a web page that contains the information you want, you can use Web Clips. Web Clips let you select a part of a web page that displays rapidly changing information so you can view it periodically while you're busy working on your computer. Instead of having to view an entire web page to look for the information you want, you can use Web Clips to see only the parts of a page that interest you.
Project goal: Create an electronic clipping service to display information that changes frequently on web pages and show you only the information that interests you.