Eric Goldstein, founder of Clipmarks, basically knows nothing about how technology works but loves using it and thinks it can be substantially more user friendly. He's also a huge fan of the New York Giants football team. Visit their company blog here.

What is Clipmarks, and what advantage does it have over competing social news and bookmarking websites?

Clipmarks is a user powered news site. Similar to services such as digg and reddit, we believe in giving editorial control to the people who use the site. What makes Clipmarks unique is that instead of posting links to entire web pages, our users clip interesting pieces of information they find within web pages and post their clips on the site for others to see. The community then determines which clips are most prominently displayed by popping ones they like best to the top of our home page. By focusing on clips instead of entire pages, we hope to enable people to read about more interesting things in less time than is possible on other web sites.

How did this idea get started, and what were its beginnings like?

We have always believed that all people would be better off if we spent more time learning from each other, rather than just passively consuming the information that mass media pushes to us. We have also believed that saving and sharing links to entire web pages is an inefficient way for the world's information to be managed. There just aren't enough hours in the day for most of us to read about all the topics we'd like to. Inspired by these beliefs, we set out to create a social media platform that makes consuming the web's information more fun and educational at the same time. The idea was pretty simple...by enabling people to clip and share bits of information they find on the web, a global pool of the most interesting information about all topics could be created for everyone to consume.

The first version of Clipmarks was released a year ago (September, 2005) and quite honestly, it's been a very challenging year. At times it has been emotionally exhausting riding the roller coaster of hope, excitement and disappointment that we have experienced along the way. I wish I could say this was easy for us, or that we got it right the first time. But the truth is, we have constantly gone back to the drawing board (white board actually) in search for the right blend of functionality, design, interface and messaging to properly turn our vision into reality. During this past summer we decided to take the lessons learned from the past year and apply them to an entirely rebuilt and redesigned web site. This new site was just released last week and, so far, we're very pleased with it. We hope our users and all visitors to the site are too :)

What do you see as your greatest challenges?

The greatest challenge for us is getting people to not only see Clipmarks as a personal tool, but also a source of unique, compelling content. There are so many services popping up everyday that it's very easy to get lumped in with the crowd. For example, the two services we're most often compared to are Diigo and Google Notebook even though I think we have very different approaches than either of them. I hope that people will start to view us as being more along the same lines of digg.com, but with a focus on clips instead of pages.

Another challenge is that we are from New York City and don't have relationships with many of the industry movers and shakers who have the power to make things happen. One person said to me that if we want Clipmarks to succeed we better move to Silicon Valley. We're not planning on doing that, but the point was well taken. Hopefully the quality of our product and integrity of our vision will carry the day.