It's Saturday morning. Wee hours, past 2 AM PST. I'm feeling mellow and relaxed. I just started using my Clipmarks account actively. Just let me say, I'm amazed time-after-time with how easily I got into it: not only does it have rounded corners in all the right places (and certainly not gratuitously), it just about always works as I expect it to.

A hitch I came across was adding to My Topics. I wish I could just enter tags in there, one after another. What I ended up having to do was: searching for a tag — it searches by tags, not fulltext it appears — looking for the green plus arrow in the upper left, then clicking that.

(I did notice some site slowdown and odd errors earlier. I'm not getting them now.)

What's really valuable about all this is: you can create reminders on-the-fly of kewl stuff you want to check out later when you've got more time, but in the meantime, other people can check it your findings and enjoy! They can "Pop" a clip for greater visibility, add comments (nice little inline text editor), and add your clips to their list if they feel it's something they want to explore in greater depth too.

Me, I just feel great that it's so social. Like I've said about Second Life, "I'm not alone." Maybe I'm stretching it in 2006, but I believe Clipmarks can be a useful educational tool: when I was a kid, I grew up reading the bite-sized, punchy writing in The National Enquirer. Every now and then, they'd run an article detailing how Enquirer was useful to an ESL teacher, helping communicate English to students while informing them of topics of relevance. In a similar vein, Clipmarks, with its magnificent potpourri of "100% User Powered" content, could really get students going in classrooms, having them aware of what's happening in a very wet and memorable way.

Even more than that, in today's world, we need information management skills. There's no shortage to dataglut! I haven't stepped inside a school in years, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression these skills aren't being taught enough. By far. It goes beyond basic computer usage and adding bookmarks, to being able to make sense and retrieve the info, and share it with your fellow human beings for extended discourse, learning, and fun — creating feedback loops and reactions, and increased knowledge for all involved. This is what I'm seeing in Clipmarks as a form of participatory media (hey, what would Howard Rheingold think?). And I've added it to my existing pantheon of how I manage daily info.

I can see how addictive it gets, "OMG MY CLIP GOT POPPED!" Infact, Adam, Chief Creative Officer, was the first to pop one of my clips. Their whole team looks pretty quick on the draw, and I mustsay I like their vision — which I actually didn't read until now, and which rings even more true with what I wrote two paragraphs up.

Where I see this going for myself: I want to use Clipmarks regularly and see how it can save me time, with my often jam-packed lifestyle. I've already clipped a few articles related to Second Life, both to share with others and keep track of myself. Have a look at my Clipmarks profile, and come aboard if you're curious.

Okay, I'm not going to turn into a hypocrite and write such a long blog post about something which is beautifully terse. But I'm inspired. And maybe I should figure out a way to auto-reject emails over a certain # of words, both sending and receiving.

Fin.