Lots of important information on powerful people and organizations and their connections is found in news stories. Read today’s New York Times, for instance, and you’ll find pieces on Newt Gingrich’s wife and the Shriver-Schwarzenegger separation. The Wall Street Journal has a lot of detail on Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype, and who the bankers were. These are good articles to “LittleSis” – to read, pull out the interesting relationships, and add them to LittleSis.

The new LittleSis bookmarklet allows you to add relationships to (and pull up contextual info from) LittleSis easily, as you read the news, without ever having to click away from the article you’re reading. In other words, the bookmarklet helps you, as a LittleSis analyst, bypass the annoyance of clicking back and forth between tabs as you add info to LittleSis; all the editing can happen right there, on the page you’re reading.

To use the bookmarklet, drag this link to your bookmarks toolbar:

LittleSis Bookmarklet (don’t click it, drag it to your toolbar)

The bookmarklet can only be used by advanced users on LittleSis. Log in and check your homepage to make sure you have the “Importer” credential, and contact us if you don’t but would like to use the bookmarklet. And if you’re not yet an analyst but want to sign up, go here.

As you’re reading an article, clicking the bookmarklet will bring up a box at the top of the browser window. If you were reading the Gingrich article, it would look like this:

You can use the bookmarklet to search for entities named in the article, optionally create new entities if they do not yet exist in the database, and create relationships noted in the article.

For instance, I used the bookmarklet to search for Newt Gingrich‘s wife, Callista Beck. It turned out she wasn’t in the database yet, so I used the LittleSis bookmarklet to add her to the database and create a “family” relationship between her and her husband. The reference link that is required for all LittleSis edits was automatically created by the bookmarklet.

Though news stories are the most obvious use case, the bookmarklet can be used on any web page you visit to pull up contextual info on individuals or organizations or add info to the LittleSis database.

Please note! The bookmarklet may be a bit buggy, depending on your browser and operating system and the site you are trying to use it on. Please contact us if you have any problems or questions. We can’t promise that we’ll be able to make it compatible with every setup, but we’ll try.