the blog

A secret project? Yes! In a hidden corner of the web, Xerpi's top geek (and chief technology officer) was tinkering away on a digital hybrid combining Google and Yahoo with Amazon and Ebay.

And Facebook. And Craigslist. And MySpace. And Dictionary.com...

In fact, twenty of the web's best sites were magically stitched together in a new super-search engine that just appeared on the web Wednesday! And when the big day came, and one site had collected together the many, there was only one thing to call it.

"ButtonALL."

"There are so many Internet search engines," announced moonlighting Xerpi geek Wray Mills, and he also acknowledged that there's lots of new ways to display search results. But ButtonALL "will be a great place to catch up on what's out there for the average user." In a press release, the site is even described as a universal remote — for the internet.

"ButtonALL simplifies things by consolidating all the most popular search engines and 'Web 2.0' applications into ONE single search page, Mills said in the big announcement. "It saves you time by not having to open new windows and re-starting searches."

And Mills' work on the project drew new attention to his design for Xerpi. "Wray is the Ruby on Rails Rock Star," gushes a post on ButtonALL's blog, acknowledging how Wray's technology skills made Xerpi "one of the best social bookmarking sites on the Internet (more yummy than del.icio.us)."

So after searching the web with ButtonALL, you can search all the the personal favorites that were bookmarked by Xerpi's users — and you'll still be using the great computer coding of geek rock star Wray.

"If you ever wanted a 'favorites' web page with drag n drop functionality that you could access from any computer," ButtonALL's blogger writes, "then you should test-drive Xerpi..."

She's a New York art designer — and a mother of five. In fact, Gabrielle Blair even named her blog "Designing Mom." "[H]er eye for the classical, functional or stylish seeps into every aspect of her life," wrote New York Metro magazine in a profile. Xerpi was about to face an appraisal by a committed professional in the fine art of graphic design.

So what did she think of Xerpi?

"It's like bookmarking on steroids."

As a graphic designer, Gabrielle apparently appreciated the way Xerpi allows the grouping of links "in a visual way" — and also, the ability to customize them!

Gabrille shared her positive review in a post on her blog last month. But maybe this represents a special triumph, because Gabrille told New York Metro that even outside of work, she finds herself approaching life experiences "through the lens of my design training." I've always thought that Xerpi's interface was its own best advocate — and in the end, it looks like it may have won Xerpi yet another convert.

"I've been using del.icio.us for my bookmarks for the last 18 months or so," Gabrille writes. "I use it to keep track of sites I've posted about and sites I want to post about. But I'm thinking about switching to Xerpi.

"It looks like it has a ton more features to help me track things more efficiently..."

It's easy to forget how many people are using Xerpi (since I've filled my page up with my own favorite links). But you can get a sense of how popular Xerpi by searching Google, where you'll find lots of people talking about it on their blogs. Xerpi faced a discriminating audience when a Manhattan-based graphic designer tested its interface. Her conclusion? "I absolutely love it."

New York graphic designer Yaritsa Arenas builds web sites for everyone from fashion stores to electric companies. But when it came to Xerpi, the interface blew her away. "There's more to explore, Yaritsa writes, but "what I've seen so far has really impressed me."

"I highly recommend it."

And Xerpi is fancy, says a web developer named Hank Williams. But "in this case, the fancy is a very good thing."

I like the way Hank describes it. "Everything is very drag and drop...." After setting up his favorite page, he'd reached a conclusion. "Elegant and simple. Well done." But that's been the general consensus in an ongoing online conversation that was started last summer. Some of Xerpi's earliest adopters were saying the very same things. ("Well organized and easy to navigate..." "Extremely easy to use...")

It would probably be egotistical to say "to know Xerpi is to love Xerpi." But I think it's smooth simplicity is hard to miss — and judging from the comments on the web, people seem to agree!

This is exciting. Celebrity photographers prowling New York City captured some rare video footage of Xerpi founder Con Way Ling!

The video's a little shaky — maybe it wasn't a real celebrity photographer — but someone's uploaded video of Con Way's presentation at a technology conference called the New York Tech Meetup.

He's not accompanied by Paris Hilton, but Xerpi marketing director Jen Yip is there to explain public views of favorites to the dazzled audience of technophiles. And Con Way triumphed over a restrictive time limit by distilling the essence of Xerpi into a couple clear insights.

"Everything's customizable," he says — names, titles, and even the location of links and blocks — and "it frees you up from the traditional limits of lists of tags"

Someone who was there was apparently impressed with Xerpi's simplicity, calling it "much more mainstream-targeted" than similar sites.

Xerpi's not a secret any more.....

I just noticed something today. Xerpi's developers snuck an extra link onto the sign-in page that lets you spy on Xerpi's top public views. (Back in December Xerpi added a link to the public views at the bottom of each user's page, but now you don't even have to sign in to see the public views.) I guess it's a reminder that Xerpi now houses some grass roots collections of very useful links. But it's also just plain fun to see what the rest of the Xerpi community is up to!

There's lots of people saving lots of favorites — and that hive of sharing is hard to resist. The "all iPhone" view now has 27 subscribers checking in for new iPhone-related links, and it's been loaded over 2,500 times! (And the anime and manga view is over 2,000!) Reading the list I realized that I could probably spend an entire afternoon just checking out all the sites that other Xerpi users have found. Maybe it's tapping one of the dark secrets of human nature. What piques my curiosity more than one of my favorite links? Someone else's favorite links...

There's favorites for everything from home renovation and real estate investing to a page with gambling and wagering sites. The "top public views" page has 20 different collections of favorites to check out — and they've got a surprising amount of variety. There's travel resources for Paris and New York, and even resources for professional dancers and actors. Like the web itself, the public views are always surprising you with strange discoveries that are new, interesting, useful.

But the best part about public views is that you can make one yourself. I like to think that someday I'll discover that the public is just as interested in my favorites as I am in theirs....

"We now have a new reporting system," Xerpi's marketing director told me last month. She crunched the numbers and made an amazing discovery. Xerpi's users have saved over 90,000 favorites!!!

And there's a surprising amount of variety in there. When we dug a little deeper, we learned that over 35,906 different web sites now have a page that's somebody's favorite on Xerpi!

Take a deep breath and think about that number for a second. There are over 100 million web sites in the world (according to numbers reported on CNN a little over a year ago.) If that's true, then Xerpi's users have already pulled off an amazing feat. They've already amassed links to .035% of all the web sites in the world!

Plus, these favorites are scattered across over 12,554 different user-created blocks. And Xerpi's busy user community didn't stop there. They've even created a whopping 6,896 tags — just to describe all the favorites!

I say "Xerpi's user community," but of course I mean — you! These numbers are a reminder that whether you realize it or not, you're part of something larger.

A community — and an ongoing moment in internet history.

High school students are migrating to the online world. A whopping 93% of teenagers now use the internet, a new study shows — up from just 73% seven years ago. (And 61% now say they use it every day!)

But it doesn't end there. Teenagers are also creating more content online. Between the ages of 12 and 17, nearly two-thirds have now created some kind of online content — a full 64%, versus just 57% in 2004.

Here's where it gets interesting. The total percentage of teenagers blogging now is 28% — up from a mere 19% in 2004. But according to the study, "virtually all of that growth...is due to the increased activity of the girls." In fact, teenaged girls are ahead of the boys in creating nearly all kinds of online content.

			Girls	Boys
Blogging		35%	20%
Sharing photos		54%	40%
Creating profiles	70%	57%
Sharing video		10%	19%				

One 17-year-old girl told the New York Times proudly that "I'm not surprised because girls are very creative, sometimes more creative than men. We're spunky!" (And another 13-year-old had a different perspective. "Most guys don't have patience for this kind of thing...")

It's already creating a stir in the blogosphere. The webmaster at "TechMamas" wrote that she'd decided to link the article "as a way to inspire parents to tell their girls to go geek..." (She also complained that the New York Times illustrated their article with Grace Hopper — the female developer of the first computer programming language compiler — and then a picture of Velma from Scooby Doo.) But it could be worse — C|Net apparently felt they couldn't make a list of the top ten girl geeks without including Paris Hilton.

Is society movie towards a big change? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men still outnumber women by nearly 3:1 in computer and math-related jobs, the New York Times reports. But with more teenage girls active online, those statistics could change for the next generation.

"I think there might be a story in this," says Con Way Ling, the founder of Xerpi. After reading the article, he did his own assessment of the patterns he'd seen for Xerpi's ad campaigns. "I've also noticed that females are three times more likely to respond to our ads than males!"

It can't be because there's more women using the internet. (It's almost an even split, according to a poll in March.) And I don't think it's because women respond to Xerpi's ads just because they identify with that woman on the sign-on page who truly loves her favorites...

But maybe some of the extra females are those pioneering teenaged bloggers that the New York Times identified, coming up through the next generation to take the 21st century by storm.

And while they're sizing up the world — they're using Xerpi!

   

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."

One of my favorite writers was Douglas Adams (who wrote "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and some other very funny science fiction books). A month before he died in 2001, I had the good fortune to hear him speak at a technology conference in San Francisco.

"Life is wasted on the living," Adams had said, and on that day he proceeded to expand our minds with a breezy, sardonic discussion about what he expected from the future. Standing in front of a curtain dotted with reflecting stars, he announced matter-of-factly that "We are participating in a 3.5 billion-year program to turn dumb matter into smart matter." One of the many things he talked about was an enormous data model that could one day contain real-time information about every object in the universe — "a soft earth, alive and developing..."

I thought of that when I heard the news last month that Xerpi's users had already created nearly 7,000 tags just to describe their "Favorites" links. The whole point of tags is to create "meta information" pointing people to appropriate content that's already been discovered. It doesn't do any good to have a web page unless there's an easy way to find it for people who are interested. Ultimately it's the user-created tags that complete the relationship between a web page and its potential readers. They're very simple — but they're also extremely useful.

"We are fed up with 'technology'," Adams had told the audience, "when all we want is 'stuff that works'." He drove his point home by talking about one crucial difference between a cellphone and a chair. "A chair doesn't have a manual," he pointed out, but a cellphone does. ("The manual will tell you how to spend 17 hours programming your phone numbers into it with a match stick.") Adams always showed a great deal of faith in the instincts of humans — and a secret fascination with the progress of technology. "Unlike previous generations, we knew it was going to different," he told the audience. "We just didn't know what it would be..."

Last Tuesday was Douglas Adams' birthday. (He would've been 57.) Seven years down the road, I had to ask myself: what did we realize in this far-away future of 2008? And I realized that we humans are now doing it for ourselves. We're collecting up our own sets of "favorites," and then scattering out a trail of tags — like bread crumbs — so that others can also find their way to them. In some small way, we've already taken that first step into a grand, mysterious future.

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes," Adams once joked.

But at least some of them can be solved with tags.

   

Guess who's the "Top Site of the Day?" Xerpi! A web-reviewing site concluded that Xerpi "is a great site with a great idea."

"Their slogan is 'to make the internet a simpler place,' and they have done just that."

But besides the rave reviews for the concept behind Xerpi, I'm excited that they also liked the finished results! Their reviewer announces that Xerpi "has a great feel and is well organized... You will be very pleased with this site if you are into keeping track of all the great sites you come across..."

And if you watch closely, you can even spot Xerpi founder Con Way Ling making a visit to the comments and sharing his philosophy. ("We want to keep things simple, clean and relevant.") And that's exactly the thing they noticed over at a site called Web 2 New York.

"Xerpi's drag and drop interface is another feature that could set the site apart in the crowded social bookmarking field."

But what's really significant is that everyone's talking about Xerpi. My family's using it, my friends are using it, and at the technology site Center Networks, Allen Stern even did a video review of Xerpi. ("I think I'm pronouncing it correctly...")

Allen says we're like other favorites sites ...but prettier! "It just looks a lot better... Much cleaner, much prettier, etc." And I'd just finished watching him say that Xerpi's public views are "fabulous" when I noticed that Xerpi even drew an enthusiastic response from one of his readers.

"Great! At last a bookmark manager with the possibility to re-arrange individual bookmarks! This is missing in almost all similar services out there.."

And what are they saying at PuntoGeek?

"Una vez importados se muestran en forma de módulos que podemos organizar por pestañas de acuerdo a las temáticas que tengan. Además podemos crear módulos con tags, esto permite resaltar ciertos enlaces de los tags que hayamos especificado. Por ejemplo, insertamos en el título del módulo “Blogs”, luego especificamos unos tags, como “gadgets, internet, internet”, y en ése módulo se mostrarán enlaces que contengan esos tags."

Whoops! I forgot that the internet is an international community. But I ran it through the Spanish-to-English translator at Babelfish, and got a delightfully fractured interpretation.

"Once mattered they are in form of modules that we can organize by eyelashes according to the thematic ones which they have..."

I think the basic message is that with Xerpi, you can organize your favorites by dragging them into blocks — but something got lost in translation.

And another message is that people are trying out Xerpi everywhere. There's a web site called "Killer Startups" in Guatemala — and they liked Xerpi too!

Xerpi.com has an attractive interface; it is simple, but creative and eye catching...

The public views are a nice way of sharing information and favorite sites...

The site is easy to navigate and contains very little clutter...

But out of all the comments we've received, this one is probably my favorite.

The logo with the tiny green heart serving as the dot for the 'i' is very cute!

   

My favorite part about Allen's video review of Xerpi on CenterNetworks was it finally gave me a chance to watch how someone else uses Xerpi! I've always wondered what other people were doing with their views. Were they "clicking through" to other sites on the web — or staying on their home page to re-arrange their favorites.

But then I hit the jackpot. The Xerpi development team shared an interesting observation about the "usage patterns" of Xerpi's users. "When users first start using Xerpi, their site visits are very high, and their 'clickthroughs' are lower," according to Xerpi's marketing director. And the more I thought about it, the more that made perfect sense. The new users are adding favorites to their new Xerpi home pages, and maybe even setting up their first community views.

But what happens then? The development team noticed that once Xerpi's users become more experienced, "their visits per day go down, and their click-throughs go up almost proportionately. (We're assuming that this is probably because they start using Xerpi more once it is set up, and visiting sites more often that they've already saved!)"

And in a way, that's very gratifying. The whole point of Xerpi is to make it easier to visit your favorites. Our data shows Xerpi's users are doing just that. They're creating a home page with links to all of their favorites — and then they start visiting them!

But I have a prediction. Soon Xerpi's developers will start seeing a third wave of "nesting," when these users discover the real power of Xerpi's public views. Once you've set up your own wonderful favorites page, the next logical step is to start sharing those favorites with other users.

Or at least, that's how it worked with me. :)

   

I got an idea from Con Way Ling, the founder of Xerpi. In November he posted on a web log that "We launched about two weeks ago and already have over a thousand users who have set us as their homepage."

But could Xerpi keep on growing? In the middle of December, I asked Xerpi's marketing director, Jen Yip, who told me that Xerpi was getting even more popular. "Signups have been steadily increasing!" she told me excitedly. "When we first launched in November, we were getting a handful of new signups each day, but now we're getting about fifty new signups each day! And we expect that number to keep growing..."

So what happened in January? Last week I checked in with Xerpi's marketing director again, one month later, and discovered that there was even better news. "We're over that magical 2000 mark," Jen told me — and she seemed even more excited.

And it is exciting to be in on the start of a community. I feel like a pioneer, like someday I'll be telling youngsters about "The early days, back in 2008, when people first started realizing that Xerpi could organize their favorites..." It seemed like such an important milestone, I went on a hunt for Con Way Ling, the founder of Xerpi, to see if I could get his reaction.

And within a few hours, there it was in my inbox. The executive summary? "It's been awesome to see all the users who've signed up for Xerpi in the short time since we launched."

But there's more good news, since counting the total number of members is just part of the story. "What gets us even more excited is that many of our users visit Xerpi 30+ times a day!" Con Way told me. And the statistics are just driving the Xerpi team to create more innovative ways to use Xerpi to organize your favorite sites.

"As the sign-up rate continues to grow, with word getting out, we're going to continue working furiously to bring out new features," Con Way announced, "to make Xerpi the best way to love your favorites!"

I'm predicting that 2008 is going to be a great year. Even though thousands of people have already discovered the joy of the site — Xerpi's going to get even better!

   

I give a lot of things to my friends -- gifts, my time, a non-judgmental ear when they are having problems -- and I also give them Xerpi. Why? One of the best ways to me to get the most out of Xerpi is to have people whose judgment and taste I trust on the site so I can learn from them by sharing their links.

And now through March 31, you can benefit from giving Xerpi to your friends by signing up for our "Give it to a Friend" contest. If you are already on Xerpi, you are automatically signed up. If not, go to xerpi.com/play and sign up to win. All you have to do is use Xerpi and you will get points for daily use. And you will also get points for all of your friends' use too. See complete contest rules on the site. You can win $500 or an iPod Touch. Not bad when you are getting organized online at the same time.

See you on Xerpi.

   

Xerpi continues to surprise me with new things! Here's some secret tricks I've discovered when creating link blocks and adding favorites.

Did you know you can...

• Format your favorites
  It's possible to italicize words in the name of a favorite — or display some of the words in bold print! It's the same formatting tags that work on web pages — add <I> before the words to italicize, and </I> where you want the italics to stop! (Or for bold, use <B> and </b>)

• Copy a link block.
  Xerpi lets you create a link block that's filled with nothing but links from another link block!

  Xerpi already lets you move a link block into a different view. (Just hold your mouse over the block's blue title bar. Your cursor turns into crosshairs which let you drag the block onto the view's tab, which creates the copy!) But if the block is on a "public" or "shared" view, Xerpi creates a copy of the block on the second view instead!

  I realized this meant I could copy any block — just by temporarily changing the view that it's on into a public view! Then dragging that block to a different view will create a copy of all its links — and I can drag that link block back to whichever view I want!

• Reverse the order of links.
  There's another interesting quirk I discovered after mistakenly creating a block of favorites in reverse alphabetical order. After I dragged the block over the tab for another view, and then dragged the resulting copy back into my first view...the order of the links had been reversed! This saved me the trouble of having to re-arrange all the links into the right order.

• Hyperlink a Link Block Title.
  It's possible to link to a specific web in the title of a link block. Just put the URL in between "anchor tags," like this!
  <a href=" url goes here "> the word to hyperlink </A>

• Give Your Link Block a Subtitle
  I've seen several people using this trick on Xerpi already. If you want to leave a short description below the title of a link block, just write it as the "title" of the first favorited link.

I guess you learn something new every day!

   

Here's another fun Xerpi view. Each of its favorite links lets you watch full episodes of your favorite TV show! There's 56 different shows, from Desperate Housewives to Heroes to CSI.

All three of the major networks have made at least some of their shows available online. CBS even added four of its daytime soap operas, and ABC is offering high-definition versions of the entire run of Lost. (And for other shows, ABC put up high-density versions of a few selected episodes, including Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Ugly Betty, and Dirty Sexy Money.)

This is a big deal, even if your New Year's resolution isn't to watch more television! It's a real sign that the web is changing the world. 2008 begins with the television writers still on strike over the royalties they'll receive in the future for online viewings of their TV shows. NetFlix is now letting their users watch movies online. And as Americans begin choosing their next President, they're facing questions submitted in the form of online YouTube videos!

But with all these options available, it becomes even more important to have a site like Xerpi, which lets users create home-grown lists showing where everything is! I typed up a quick "cheat sheet" below of which TV shows are already available online using Xerpi and this new "Free TV" public view. Let this serve as a reminder that we're entering a whole new world. In 2008, we're not just bookmarking our favorite web pages.

Now you can also bookmark your favorite TV shows!

ABC	CBS	NBC
According to Jim	As the World Turns	30 Rock
Big Shots	Big Bang Theory	American Gladiators
Brothers and Sisters	The Bold and the Beautiful	Bionic Woman
Carpoolers	Cane	Celebrity Apprentice
Cashmere Mafia	CSI	Chuck
Dance War	CSI: Miami	Conan O'Brien
Desperate Housewives	CSI: NY	Friday Night Lights
Extreme Makeover Home Edition	The Guiding Light	Heroes
Grey's Anatomy	How I Met Your Mother	Journeyman
Lost	Jericho	Las Vegas
Men in Trees	Kid Nation	Life
My So-Called Life	Moonlight	Medium
Notes from the Underbelly	NCIS	My Name is Earl
October Road	Numb3rs	The Office
Private Practice	Power of 10	Passions
Pushing Daises	Rules of Engagement	Quarterlife
Samantha Who	Shark	The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
Ugly Betty	Survivor: China
	The Price is Right
	The Unit
	The Young and the Restless

   

Happy New Year everyone! At Xerpi, we are really excited about 2008. We've got a lot planned for the site and are very very psyched to get it all out there.

But loving what you do, and what you are working on, doesn't make it any easier to get out of your relaxed holiday pace and back to the office. After the long holiday break including two four-day weekends, I woke up this morning and thought. What? Where? Who?

Luckily, I organize my Xerpi almost like a master "to do" list. Now that the holidays are over, I can delete, or archive some of my gift list blocks, and start adding new ones. Perhaps a 'Resolutions' block? or a 'Research for Resolutions' block?

And, to get back into my work rhythm, I just go to my 'Work' view and start going through my 'Daily Monitoring' and 'Need to Look Into' blocks. I have to say that before my coffee, and especially today I think I do this a bit robotically at first -- but what is that saying? "Fake it, until you make it."

Xerpi helps me fake it, for sure!

   

For Christmas-time, I'm celebrating by decorating my Xerpi home page with pictures!

Instead of the name of a hyperlink, I discovered it's possible to swap in the HTML code for the location of images that are somewhere else on the web. So instead of "The New York Times," I gave my favorite the name

<img src="http://destinyland.org/annette-frankie.jpg">

and my home page displayed the picture!

And then the fun began. It turns out that even animated pictures can be displayed on a Xerpi favorites page. So I scrambled around collecting an assortment of my favorite animated pictures -- like the dancing hamsters, and the jumping banana... Soon I had a glorious hodgepodge of strange internet images, which I'm sharing here as a public view.

Think you can do better? I think so too. But that's the great thing about Xerpi. I got the idea from the public view of Wray Mills, who's the site's official geek blogger. This gave me a warm feeling inside, because it felt like we were all part of the collaborative experiment that is Xerpi. Besides sharing our favorite links, and our favorite pictures, we're also sharing our favorite tricks for getting the most out of them!

I'm imagining where this could lead. Maybe someday there will be a crazy image war, where different editors of a public view take turns re-arranging its pictures, each one placing their own strange favorites at the top of the page.

Maybe Santa's elves could use it to argue about which picture to feature on the North Pole's Christmas card...

   

We've been talking a lot about how Xerpi simplifies planning for the holidays. It's a festive time of year, though, so to express that Xerpi-enhanced simplicity, I decided to try re-writing the lyrics of a popular Christmas song.

Imagine me showing up on your doorstep — bundled up in red and green holiday finery — and singing this song to the tune of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Xerpi, the favorites web page,
had a lot of favorite links.
All of the sites to go for
gifts and fun and food and drinks.

All of the other pages
found themselves in Xerpi's blocks.
Users would share their favorites
in a pretty-colored box!

On a busy Christmas Eve,
Santa's far away.
Xerpi with its links so bright
Helps you plan your Christmas right!

All of the happy users
found the sites they're dreaming of.
Xerpi the favorites web page,
organized their web with love!

Happy holidays, everyone!

Ho ho ho....

   

I can't believe it's the middle of December already - just two short weeks until the new year. Last week, Xerpi made it's New Year's Resolution -- to get Xerpi users organized online in 2008.

And why not get organized online? After all, it can open the door to so many other great changes you can make in your life. One of my personal resolutions for 2008 is to get more organized with my finances. On my main Xerpi page, I've set up a link block with links to some of the best articles I've seen on which documents to save, how to find a great financial advisor, tax law changes, etc. So even if my resolution slips my mind because of everything else going on, the information I need will always be ready and waiting on Xerpi.

Now off to finish some holiday errands!

   

When they say Xerpi simplifies holidays, they're not kidding. I searched Xerpi for the word "Christmas", and found over 75 favorite links!

Try it... If you're shopping for your boyfriend, you'll find links with Christmas Gift Ideas for Men, "Romantic Gifts for Him," and even one labelled "Christmas Presents For Your Boyfriend!"

There's "Gift Ideas for Couples," "Cute Japanese Toys, Dolls & Collectibles," and one that just offers to give you "Amazing Christmas Ideas."

I did a search on Hanukkah, and Xerpi pulled up more holiday links. (One offered to let me "Learn about Chanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights" or "learn the rules for playing dreidel, and a recipe for latkes!")

But what I like best about surfing the web is serendipity — I always find something even more wonderful than what I was originally searching for. Xerpi definitely proved this to me when searching on the word "Christmas." One favorite linked to a web site called "I am bored.com" which was hosting a copy of a hilarious three-minute video promising "the best Christmas lights ever." It shows an amazing house display synchronized with a bombastic electric guitar version of Christmas carols. (I'm just glad I don't live next door to them!)

Xerpi also found a link to some fan fiction for the anime cartoon Naruto titled "What I Want For Christmas." ("She enters, and her seductive innocence floors him so...") There was even a link to a news story called "Syphilis for Christmas," but it didn't seem particularly jolly...

And one link made me really jealous. It told the story a San Francisco geek who received his first Christmas card of the year...from Google! (They sent him a digital photograph frame which even played mp3s!)

I ended up spending over half an hour just clicking through all the interesting links.

But maybe it makes sense. After all, besides giving us a chance to spend time with our loved ones, I've always thought of the holiday as a time for fun surprises.

And I never fail to find a lot of fun surprises when searching Xerpi!

   

By day I work at Xerpi. By night I work on my performance career - acting, dancing, improv. Right now I'm taking a workshop at the Pan Asian Repertory Theater in New York. The workshop is great, and has inspired me to start researching and developing a solo performance work which I am very excited about.

The performance is based on the life of a real person. With any writing and development of this type, there are a lot of materials offline (books, files, records, transcripts) and online (interviews, videos, articles, reviews, pictures, related websites, other links to this person's work) that need to be found and researched. I'm finding Xerpi to be such an invaluable tool while I do this.

I set up a private view for my research, and created blocks for the different types of online sources I am finding. As I expand my research, I find that I can put a lot of the 'offline' material on Xerpi too. Whether it's the website link to a theatrical publisher of a related play I want to study, or a link to directions for an important place in this person's life that I want to visit, it's all saved on Xerpi.

When it comes time to create my reference list for the piece, it will be a snap -- everything will be right there on my research view.

Xerpi, how did I live without you?

   

Xerpi keeps getting better. I just noticed that the bottom of my favorites page has new link called "Public Xerpis." It leads to a web page showing the ten most popular "public" views created by Xerpi's users and user communities!

There's serious views about real estate investing, and fun views about anime — each one filled with several link blocks loaded with relevant "favorite" links. There's even a view for Xerpi's favorite blogs (which ate up a half hour of my morning because I discovered so many cool sites to read...!)

So not only can Xerpi collect your favorites into one easy-to-use location. It's also a way to view collections that are being shared by other users. I predict we'll start seeing people collaborating on the definitive set of links for the topics that spark their passions. As they're scouting the web for even newer and better sites, their public views will get better and better.

I have to mention one special link hidden in the Public Xerpis. (Maybe I should call it "my favorite Favorite"...) There's a public view that's simply called "Metal", with a link block for the headbanging music's record labels, bands, news, and games. I discovered that tucked in the bottom of that view is a special block called "Audio/Visual" delights. And one of its links is a web page full of dark and hilarious drawings of...bunny suicides.


Besides making me laugh out loud, it reminded me how much better web surfing has become in 2007. There's now more ways to discover really great links — links that are someone else's favorites, and link collections that have made it into our selection of the "Ten Best." The best stuff finds its way to the top, carried up from the grass roots by the good will of all its unseen fans — even something as trivial and strange as "Bunny Suicides".

I laughed, I cried, and I fell in love all over again... With Xerpi.

   

I like the name "Xerpi." It's got a mystique to it. (What could it mean?!) It's like a mystery experience that's waiting for you in a hidden corner of the web. Type that magic word into your browser, and it leads to a secret oasis that's full of favorite web pages.

Sometimes I even think Xerpi should be a verb. (As in "Ooh, I love this link so much... I think I'm going to Xerpi it!") I'm not the only one who feels this way. One of Xerpi's earliest users sent us an email saying he likes to "Xerpi" links using his laptop computer at home. With the "Add Content" buttons in his web browser, he sends the URLs into his favorites link block, where they're ready to be reviewed when he gets to work the next day. "I enjoy the ability to find a link while browsing on my laptop at home, then have it waiting for me when I get in the next morning and I actually have the attention span to digest the content!"

I'm tempted to do the same thing — and to use the same words to describe it. I'll Google information about a movie that I want to see after work, but then after I've Googled those web pages, I'll Xerpi them.

To settle this question, I went to the Oracle of Xerpi — or at least, to the woman who handles the official marketing language. "What is Xerpi?" I asked, supplicantly.

"Xerpi is the next generation of social bookmarking," a portentous voice replied. "It's a site that aims to make the internet manageable and personally relevant..."

But wait, there was more. "With new technology that powers a drag and drop interface, Xerpi users can organize and share their favorite bookmarks and design their own internet."

I think the answer's in there somewhere.

If I stop to think about it, there's something revolutionary about surfing the web using a browser equipped with Xerpi's "Add Content" buttons. Besides sending the links back to my own block, I can also share these special web finds with all Xerpi's users.

Xerpi's offering a new technology, and a new activity, and when it all comes together we're ultimately surfing the web in an entirely new way.

Maybe along with that, we're also going to have to come up with some new words to describe it!

   

Every year one of my best friends and I swap 'wish lists' for the holiday. Usually I agonize over it for a while and can't seem to remember anything that I want, then end up sending a list of a few times that I think of on the spur of the monent.

This year is different. Now that I shop with Xerpi I already have a block called "Gifts that People can get for me" where I have been stashing several not-too-expensive items that catch my eye, but aren't necessities that I have already bought for myself.

To get my list to my friend, I created a friends and family view (Clicked the New View (+) button) called 'My Holiday Wish List." I went back to my shopping view and dragged the "Gifts that People can get for me" block over to the new view. Since I planned to share this view with my friend, I renamed the link block "Jen's wish list."

Now I just needed to give editor (so she can add her own list) access to the view to my friend. I clicked the edit (pencil) icon in the view tab, and selected "Friends and Family" next to "Who can see this view?." My friend was already in my friend list, so I clicked on her Xerpi name and then clicked > to move her name into the list of editors for the view. I noted the shared URL for the view at the bottom of the edit dialog box and clicked Update. A quick email to my friend with the shared URL let her add it to her Xerpi page with one click.

Now she can see all of the items I would like. It's her turn to create, or drag a block with her items to the view. Both of us can start our holiday shopping for each other and get to these items with one click. It's so much easier than trading emails or trying to track wish lists saved on multiple ecommerce sites!

   

Hope everyone in the U.S. had a great Thanksgiving, and at the very least, a nice long weekend. We've been really busy at Xerpi, meeting people in New York coffee shops, presenting at Web 2.0 Tech Meetup, and basically spreading the word.

But now Thanksgiving has passed, holiday decorations have gone up and Christmas carols are playing everywhere. ‘Tis the season for gifts, family, travel, cooking and a general state of frenzy and overwhelm.

Xerpi can make the holiday season a bit more manageable this year. Xerpi stores and organizes important links and bookmarks, from your sisters flight home to your office secret Santa's desired gift, mom's potato latke recipe to your online holiday radio station, the family wish list, the holiday decorating article you've been meaning to read, your kids' favorite Christmas cookie recipe and more, all on one easy to use, personalized Xerpi page that is accessible from any computer.

Xerpi lets users create category blocks to store links, as opposed to long lists, making things organized for even Mr. Claus himself, who could drag and drop links between the naughty and nice block, if he so desired.

The site's community views also let users publish their page to share with friends, family or the entire online community, so that anyone can add, change or edit links as they need, while the mobile feature lets users access their favorites from any handheld device for on-the-go browsing.

Getting organized, at least online, does not need to be a New Year's resolution!

   

You'll notice that there's another a new link at the bottom of Xerpi home pages now that's called simply "Press." I thought it was fun to read a little bit about the people who helped build Xerpi.

And what I especially liked was it included some interesting personal details about the Xerpi team. It strikes the right tone, because ultimately Xerpi is just people — you, me, them — and all the links that we love. (Plus the web site that lets us save or share those links...)

Anyways, I thought I'd share some of the interesting tidbits I learned about the founders of Xerpi.

Did you know....

• Xerpi's CEO Con Way Ling has also been a professional dancer, "and previously danced with the Martha Graham Ensemble!"

• Marketing Director Jen Yip came to Xerpi from Sun Microsystems, and has worked as a professional dancer, actor, and model!

• Co-Founder Will Becker studied at Oxford University, and received a first class honors degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

• Xerpi's Chief Technology Officer Wray Mills lives "on a small farm in Virginia with his wife, two daughters, ten horses, five dogs, and seven cats!"

By the way, Wray's been keeping a special "Xerpi Geek" blog which you can see linked at the left of this page. In his last post, he asked users to email any suggestions they might have for how to improve Xerpi.

I am anxious to hear not just what you like about Xerpi, but what you don't like and any ideas you have for making it better. In fact, I am looking forward to getting completely overwhelmed with emails so we can start a Xerpi user mailing list and/or discussion board.

See? Xerpi really is all about the people...

   

Come see Xerpi co-founder Con Way Ling present Xerpi at the next Web 2.0 Meetup in New York.

When: Tuesday, November 20, starting at 6.00 pm
Where: Gallery Bar, 120 Orchard Street between Delancey & Rivington, New York, NY

See more details about the event on the Web 2.0 site.

Say "hi" to us and have a drink!

   

It's like a fairy tale, but it's true.

Paolo DiVincenzo lives in North Carolina, where his company makes the special slips worn with wedding gowns. ("Soft taffeta...with multiple layers of gathered tulle...") And there's an equally special line of jewelry for weddings. They're in over a thousand bridal stores around the world...

Somehow, Xerpi is a part of the mix. Ultimately Paolo created a Shared View on Xerpi filled with all the links that his team needs. "I like knowing that any of our employees have access to the links to check in on the business while they're away," says Paolo. "And their email!"

To find the magical materials that eventually become wedding wear, Paolo works with over 50 companies scattered across the planet — so every day his team checks their web sites for ordering numbers, new products, and sometimes even their inventory levels. Paolo arranged all the links into dedicated blocks, which makes them much easier to find.

And that was just the beginning. For example, another block links to all Paolo's own wedding apparel sites. This block also has links for shipping terms and other information to answer question quickly. And there's another block for "administration" links, which let his team enter orders, update their product listings, and, yes, even access the company's email remotely. If a call comes in about a specific ad, Paolo's team can just go to an "Advertising" block of links and pull up that specific offer. He's even created a special link block for his team that's filled with the latest articles about the industry, along with key data and useful market information.

Anyone who's ever been part of a wedding party knows that it involves an almost endless amount of preparation — and Paolo knows it too. When wedding season hits, it's vital that Paolo's company has all their materials ready, and it's the "Established Suppliers" block lets his whole team access the 50 supplier links for placing orders. A second block also lets Paolo save URLs for possible future suppliers that he needs to research. (Sometimes Paolo finds these links when he's surfing the web at home on his laptop!) "We find a link once, we 'Xerpi' it, and then we all have access to it, indefinitely. It's simple!" Paolo said in an email.

"Xerpi helps ensure that important information is not falling through the cracks. We can get to our suppliers' web sites easily, and we can access market data we've discovered." But there's also one last link block that's popular with his team. It's called "Water Cooler."

"It's fun stuff we find that we want to share."

It's pretty common in the workplace for people to use the same URLs — but what's not so common is having the ability to collect them all together into one shared place. "How many times have you dug through your email archive to find a link someone sent you?" Paolo asks. "It's a terrible time waster!"

So when he finally discovered Xerpi — it was love at first sight.

How do you use Xerpi? Send us an email!

   

There's a lot of excitement at the Xerpi offices this week. Yesterday, we officially released our community views feature and now we are getting ready for our coffee shop event tomorrow, between 2-4pm.

If you will be in Manhattan, come meet co-founder Con Way Ling, learn about Xerpi, and get a free cuppa Joe while you're at it. Official invitation and details below. Hope to see you there!

******

Do you have too many videos, articles, social networks, email accounts, gym schedules, items to get to 'someday' and sites you can never remember online?

At Xerpi, we think browsing the internet should be as simple as having a cup of coffee.

We're a free website you can use to customize your own internet -- with all of your favorite bookmarks in one place -- making the internet manageable and personally relevant. It's free, and it's easy to set up. We'll even do it for you. If you bring in your lap top we'll go one step further by importing all of your bookmarks

Let us buy you a cup of Joe and show you what we mean. Caffeine and organization at 17 Bleecker — 17 Bleecker Street between Bowery and Lafayette St (6 train to Bleecker) on Thursday, November 15th between 2pm and 4pm. It’s a cozy neighborhood café with great coffee, pastries, food, and free Wi-Fi.

Brought to you by Xerpi.

   

Yes, it rhymes with herpes, but don't let that scare you. The name was born in a moment of frustration when Xerpi co-founder Con Way Ling came to the realization that every possible URL on the planet was taken.

Xerpi (pronounced zer-pee, think 'Z' like 'xylophone') is not an STD. It is a ridiculously easy to use Web site that will definitely revolutionize the way you process information on the Internet. Sounds dramatic, I know. Sounds like iGoogle or MyYahoo, you might say. Well, sort of, but not really. It doesn’t replace the sites you already use, but instead provides a better way to use the Internet.

Xerpi in a nutshell is this: simplify your day and transform your life by capturing useful information in a central location for later action/consumption/review/research. Catalog that information in an organic way that is natural to you and share it with others – if, and when you want – and tap into the wealth of cool stuff already tagged for you by like-minded users. (For a spot-on example, check out Wray’s hilarious post on how Xerpi helped bring his technologically-challenged mom into the 21st Century.)

In short, you can use Xerpi in your personal and business life to:

• Save those long-ass articles your smarty-pants friends send you from Salon and the New York Times Magazine
• Keep that link to the newest picture of hot action David Beckham (you may want to share it later with some of your less enlightened friends!)
• Save all the links to your webmail and other accounts in one place for easy access on the road
• Bookmark the fancy pocket knife you want to get your brother for his birthday

Xerpi’s newest feature, Community Views, allows you to publish your favorites (including those obscure, insider travel site -- here's one on Paris) to your friends or the whole world if you are just that crazy. I must say, it’s pretty kick ass – and that's not a phrase a proper Midwestern girl like myself usually says, so don't take it lightly.

Try it and see for yourself how quickly Xerpi spreads – and how quickly you develop a burning desire for more. Once you see the love, spread it. Your friends will be happy to catch it (I just can’t resist the herpes puns here!). Seriously though, I love Xerpi almost as much as I love The Wire, but don't even get me started on that.

   

I told my friend Richard about Xerpi — and he surprised me with an unexpected treat.

Richard's a big fan of the Beach Boys, and "Xerpi" does sound a little bit like the word "surfing." So this morning I checked my email, and there it was.

A song parody that Richard had written that was all about Xerpi, and sung to the tune of the Beach Boys' song, Surfin' USA....

If everybody had a notion,
Across the USA,
Then everybody'd go Xerpi
Just like my good friend Dave!

You'll see 'em saving their web sites,
Searching for new ones too.
And sharing all of their favorites.
Xerpi USA!

You'll catch 'em making their link blocks,
And a Community View
Where everyone can add favorites
or find a page that's new.

All over the web, now
Send bookmarks back to their page!
Everybody's gone Xerpi
Xerpi USA...

We're saving our favorite pages
arranged in pretty squares,
Or matching our favorite tag words
to yours, mine, and theirs.

You'll see 'em linking to Google
And dictionaries, too!
Everybody's gone Xerpi
Xerpi USA.

We'll all be planning out a block
We're gonna fill with links
Of sites to surf or go shopping,
places to meet for drinks...

Even out with our cellphones
we'll take our bookmarks away!
Tell the browsers it's Xerpi
Xerpi USA.

I can almost hear the backup vocals now.

They're singing "Favorites, favorites, U.S.A..."

Ah Flamenco - the music, the culture, the dancing! We have some very flamenco-oriented Xerpi'ites (or is it Xerpians?) who have created a Flamenco Community Page with the best and hottest flamenco information out there. Check it out for flamenco events, videos, class schedules, performers, and information around the US, and around the world!

Barbara Chan is the Xerpi Flamenco community owner. She has been studying flamenco for over 15 years, has made numerous educational trips to Spain, and runs the New York Flamenco Dance Workshop Calendar. Her calendar enables everyone who is 'anyone' in the NY flamenco world to track all of the visiting professionals from Spain, and her site gives a wealth of information on flamenco happenings in NY and beyond.

It's having great insiders like Barbara building our Xerpi communities that make our community views so strong. What community would you like to build?

Coffee has been on my mind lately. Probably because we are planning a great Xerpi coffee shop event in Manhattan -- stay tuned for details. You'll be able to meet founder Con Way Ling in person, hear all about Xerpi, get great online organization tips, even get help setting up your Xerpi -- and the coffee will be on us. Can't wait to meet more current and future Xerpi users!

Back to coffee, or rather, coffee shops. Because I don't live in Manhattan, but work there, I often find myself with pockets of time to spend in the city which are too short to allow a round trip subway trip home, and too long to lurk comfortably in the lobby of my next appointment. Finding a place to spend these pockets of time, and get some work done can be a challenge.

Today on CupofNYC I found this amazing list of coffee shops in NYC with free wifi. I've saved this link on my Xerpi mobile block so I can get to it on my Treo, whenever I need to find a place close to me at that moment. As of today, they list 52 places and they update their listings all the time. While you're there, check out the rest of the site for interesting reviews and information on the NYC coffee scene. I put the link to the main site on my Xerpi 'New York Food' link block.

Now all I need to do is grab my trusty PowerBook and head out the door in the morning, knowing that I can be productive if I need to be before I get home. For me, that is a little more peace of mind.

It's here! The official launch date of Xerpi!!

Xerpi is now a real boy instead of a talking wooden puppet. Or something like that....

Along with the official launch comes a press release with a cool official quote from Xerpi's founder, Con Way Ling. "We designed Xerpi to be a clean, intuitive site that saves time and in the process makes life — at least online — easier!"

Now if Xerpi could only help me find my missing car keys. (I wish I could bookmark them...)

I learned something I didn't know from the launch press release. Apparently Xerpi was originally called "Go Do" when it was first launched in the UK in 2004...

But what happens now that we've officially launched in the United States? Well, Xerpi continues being intuitive, elegant, and easy to use. A lot of the post-launch action happens behind the scenes. Xerpi insiders are spreading the word to the media as we speak.

And I'm spreading the word to my friends. I asked my friend Meredith to give Xerpi a try, and she wrote back with a nice little surprise.

I like it already because the "i" in "Xerpi" is dotted with a heart. I love stuff like that!

See what happens when you tell your friends about Xerpi?

Six months of using Xerpi, and I never even noticed the little heart....

When I first saw this movie, I wanted to believe it was real. That somewhere there's a cute young office worker, and she's using our video contest to share an important message with the world...

How Xerpi solved her frustration with her loser boyfriend Doug!

But it turns out for this entry came from one of the big guns -- a multimedia designer who works at a big accounting firm by day, and in his spare time focusses on making movies. "My current project is a documentary about a facility for severely handicapped children in Illinois," says Lou Gabriel, "and the issues they deal with getting their funding."

"It's a very compelling story," Lou told me this week, "one that I'm determined to tell. I entered the Xerpi.com contest to raise the funds I need to complete the documentary..."

Our first place prize should help get you started...

Congratulations, Lou!

Oh my gosh! It's cartoon cavemen — and they're using Xerpi!

I'm proud to present the first winner in the "Use Xerpi" amateur video contest!
The homegrown video shows someone who looks a lot like my favorite cartoon caveman — Barney Rubble — surfing the web at a stone-age desk (complete with a computer). A big caveman named Fred — er, "Frank" — brags that thanks to Xerpi, "I'm slippin' through cyberspace like a pterodactyl on marsh grass!" After a little trouble pronouncing the word "Xerpi," his friend "Barry" delivers his final verdict. "Sounds fantastic!"

"I can never remember the gosh-darn URLs..."

Behind this funny video is a Florida animation enthusiast named John Hill, who decided to enter the contest because "it gave me an excuse to make a cartoon!" And to give his video added realism, John even brought in the real Fred Flintstone!

Sort of. Both characters got their voices from 52-year-old actor Gregory Neff, who played the famous cartoon caveman in several live shows at Universal Studios Florida. "I've always been a fan of the Flintstones and the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons," says John. "So 'the Tubestones' is my homage to the Flintstones!"

To bring it all together, John used an animating software called Anime Studio. But the more we talked, the more I realized that John isn't just a Xerpi-loving filmmaker — he's also a Xerpi user! "My Xerpi links include the Anime Studio forum — a great place for anyone wanting to learn the program — and the web-log of John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren and Stimpy.

"And of course, my own blog!

John's video is a great way to start the winner's showcase for our Use Xerpi Video Contest — and John's a very good sport. When we contacted him before the judging, he wished good luck to all the other film-makers who were getting ready to dive into Xerpi's video contest, and added that "I'm very excited."

John won second place. So be sure to check back here on Friday to see the amazing first place winner in the great Xerpi video contest!

We have a lot going on at Xerpi today, preparing for our U.S. launch tomorrow. It's the hectic days like today that make me truly appreciate Xerpi's organizational features.

I used to think of Xerpi as kind of an 'link filing cabinet.' I thought -- what a great place to drop all of the links I want to keep around 'just in case.' Kind of like that paperwork you keep around 'just in case' until you leave the company and then it goes into the big dumpster sized recycling bin.

But then I realized that there are some internet places that I need to visit, or monitor on a daily basis. For work this can be blogs that are relevant to Xerpi's space, or video contest pages that we need to monitor for submission, even internal links such as our bug tracking site, which I need to check in on daily.

For personal use, I check some of my friend's blogs daily, to see what they are up to, and if I am watching an item for purchase on eBay -- or selling one -- I like to keep an eye on that page regularly too.

It's this concept of 'frequently accessed links' that I didn't get before. Now that I get it, I've created a Xerpi block on my 'Work' view called "Daily monitoring" -- there I put all of the blogs, news sites, contest pages, and other work related things I need to track daily. On my "Main" view, I created a 'Check out daily' block, and put all of my ebay watchlist items, friend blogs, casting sites, and any other dynamic sites I need to check regularly. If things get crazy like today, I just make sure that I take at least a few minutes to drill down each of these 'daily' blocks and make sure I haven't missed anything too important. If you are pressed for time, having what you need in one place can really make all the difference.

I'm so excited. The winners have been announced for the Xerpi movie contest!

A few weeks ago, we laid out the concept for the big Xerpi "film-making" competition.

It's all about capturing one simple idea about Xerpi. "Once people try it, they love it."

Your mission: make a video that shows the fun and the excitement of using Xerpi -- or anything else that will intrigue viewers to try out the site!

We'll be unveiling the two (terrific!) user-submitted Xerpi videos next week. But you don't have to be a film-maker to join in the fun. "We are currently collecting user testimonials," says a Xerpi marketing manager. So if you'd like to share your feelings about Xerpi, here's your chance!

"What I like about Xerpi is that I can save all the websites that I visit everyday -- and have them in a place I can access when I'm away from home!"

See how easy it is? I just cut-and-pasted that from an email I got from my friend John. But it could be you! Just leave your comment at the bottom of this story (or send an email to jen@xerpi.com.)

So there's movies, testimonials...and I've got some more news. All this is going to be the start of something big. Specifically, it's part of the big publicity splash around Xerpi's official launch date on October 10. The excitement kicks up another notch starting next week!

Years from now, when they tell the story of Xerpi — you can say you were in on it from the beginning!

I've been writing a lot about Xerpi's new features. There's the ability to create a shared view with bookmarks for the public or a selected group of your Xerpi friends. And then there's the new ability to create a "mobile" view for your PDA or cellphone.

But then I got a strange idea — what if you created a public view...and then tried to access it on your mobile device?

It was an experiment so crazy, I just had to try it. I was envisioning creating a set of favorites to leave out for all my on-the-move friends. Maybe someday I'd create a scavenger hunt, where each favorite led to a clue about a different real-world location.

Ultimately, the experiment gave me a new appreciation for what we already have. The "Mobile" link blocks that Xerpi has created are optimized for mobile devices — and they look great when you pull them up on your cellphone. Just bringing up a regular Xerpi view on a cellphone will also display all the favorites — you can still read the names of all the links, and you can still follow them to whatever useful page you've included in the view. But Xerpi's layout is optimized for viewing favorites in a web browser on a PC. On a cellphone, there's extra spacing, and a couple extra lines to navigate.

Like I said, it was an experiment — and I did learn a few things. I found out that a lot of my favorite web pages really aren't designed to be viewed easily on a mobile device anyways. Even if they were... would I really want to use those little arrow keys on the phone to keep clicking my way through the list until I eventually found the favorite I needed?

If I'm surfing the web on my cellphone, I'm probably looking for a specific piece of information — so it makes sense to designate which subset of my favorites I'll need on those "mobile" occasions, and then just add those into the Mobile Links Block on my Xerpi page. While the designer specifications for Xerpi's mobile blocks say they can hold an unlimited number of links, just remember — the more links you have, the more scrolling you'll end up doing. Besides, sites with information that's specifically for mobile devices are usually also the ones that designed to be mobile-friendly — optimized for display on the smaller screens of a cellphone or PDA.

I think I learned something else. The world is still wondering what the future mobile computing will look like. We're just now discovering that the information we want can follow us to the locations that we want.

Now that there's some exciting new capabilities in the world — it's up to us to figure out the best way to use them!

In order to kick off our community features, we've built a community view of links for free attractions, events, and services in New York City. Click here to add the view to your Xerpi page.

If you are logged in, the view will add it self automatically to your page, and you will see it as another tab. If you are not logged in, you will be prompted to do so. If you are not signed up already (and why aren't you? :-) you will be prompted to sign up.

It took more research than I thought to build this page, and I learned a lot in the process. Some of my favorite finds:

• Big Apple Greeter - Visitors can get a free tour from a 'real New Yorker.' The tour guides are all volunteers who love showing the city off to visitors and newcomers.
• Times Square Expose Free Walking Tour - Free behind the scenes walking tour of the Time Square area, every Friday at Noon
• Federal Hall National Memorial - On Wall St, where George Washington took the oath of office as our first President, also home to the first Congress, Supreme Court, and Executive Branch offices (I walked by this building almost every weekday for 4 years and never bothered to go inside and see what it was)

Wow. Even on a tight budget, I can still explore the city! I'm going to keep adding to this page, so if anyone has any great free stuff that I haven't included, feel free to add a comment and let me know, or email me at jen@xerpi.com.

You know what would be really handy? If you could access your favorite bookmarks when you really needed them — when you're out it in the real world!

Imagine walking around on a sunny afternoon, and then whipping out your Blackberry or iPhone — or a cellphone, Palm Pilot, or some other PDA — and having a special block of links waiting for you!

Now you can do just that — with Xerpi's new "mobile blocks!"

Xerpi's developers did some major behind-the-scenes coding to enable special mobile-ready displays of any links from the new Mobile Links block. It works just like any other block on your Xerpi home page. (Except to create it you click on the "Add Mobile Block" icon at the top of the page — instead of on the regular "Add Links Block" icon.) Just drag the links you want into your mobile block — and they'll be waiting for you when you point your PDA or cellphone to m.xerpi.com/username. (Where username is your actual Xerpi user name.)

The page has been optimized specially for reading on mobile devices — and you can add an unlimited number of links into your Mobile Links block. (When you drag them into the block, Xerpi leaves the original link in its original block, and creates a copy in the Mobile block.) Since it's tied to your user name, there's only one Mobile Link Block per account. But since there's no limit on the number of links, one is enough!

If you're using a mobile device, you already know how handy they can be. When you're out and about, it's easy to find yourself in situations where you need information — and you need it quick! The developers at Xerpi whipped up some examples.

Maps
Weather
Phone directories
Bus schedules
Restaurant guides
Driving directions
Movie times

But that's just scratching the surface. I was telling a friend it's like having a genie who can answer any question. Xerpi's users can now have access to a personalized collection of any and all web resources that they think they'll need when they're out and about.

I can't wait to try it out!

Did you know you could drag and drop an entire link block into a new view? A crosshair appears whenever your mouse is over the title of a block of favorites. Then just left-click on the block — and drag!

When you hold the block over the new view's tab at the top of your page, that tab's border changes from green to red. Then when you release the mouse, the block magically disappears from the current view — and re-appears on the new one!

This is a great way to tidy up your Xerpi home page. You don't always need all your link blocks at the same time. And sometimes having them all cluttered onto one page can even make it harder to spot the ones you need!

I've been trying to look at my favorites differently — thinking of special "sets" of link blocks — and then giving each set its own dedicated view. While I've got many useful blocks of links, sometimes I'll just want one group of those blocks, and other times it's a different group. (Plus, now that Xerpi lets me create public views, I've going to start creating new views with sets of public links.)

Of course you don't have to drag the blocks to a new view — you can also just move them to a different location on the page. (Maybe the first column could be "Morning" link blocks, and the third column could be "Evening" link blocks?) If you're new to Xerpi, you might want to check out this post — Top Ten Ways to Customize Xerpi.

As I was saying back in June — Xerpi can be whatever you want it to be. It's your favorites, and your view of your favorites.

Knock yourself out!

Xerpi's new public views proved one thing to me — that whenever you release a new technology, you can never predict all the cool things people will do with it!

There's already a public view that's all about... flamenco dancing. (See? You can create a public view about anything!) And some iPhone lovers at Xerpi have created a view that's all about the iPhone!

Are you curious what other public views are available? So am I! Xerpi's developers are working behind the scenes to surprise us with a way to look at all Xerpi's new public views. And there are some more "pioneer" communities that are already being tested.

Anime
Student study groups
Fantasy football league
Project managers

And of course, there one more group that might start creating an entirely unique set of public favorites soon.

Your own friends!

Q: Does it takes a village to build a Xerpi home page?

A: No — but it sure is fun!

Xerpi just unveiled a new feature — Xerpi Community! You've always loved your favorites, but now you can share those bookmark views with your friends. (And of course, now your friends can also share pages of their favorites with you!)

But why stop there? While you're sharing your view, now you can also let your friends add their favorites too!

Here's how it works. Just click on the "pencil" icon at the top of a view's page (in the tab with its name). Not only can you re-name a view — now you can also designate its special sharing status. You can share it with the public — everyone on the web — or just make it available to "family and friends." (And there's still a third choice for the classic "for your eyes only" view — private!)

Selecting "Friends" will pull up a clickable list of all of your Xerpi friends. Then just select which ones you want to share your view. (There's also a second list where you can select which friends can add and edit the links!) Below that the window displays the web address for your new view — so you can cut-and-paste it into an email and start telling your friends...

I'm excited about this. Just think of all the communities that can now collaborate on a Xerpi view.

• Members of your family?
  
• Those people who surf the web at work!
• Your old friends from that class reunion
• All the people in your neighborhood...

I got a sneak preview at the new Xerpi help file, and they came up with some more good examples.

• A study group at school sharing research and project links
• Rock climbing buddies, sharing links about gear, climbing spots, and places to camp
• A law firm, keeping current on legislation and sharing articles.

It's so flexible, it's hard to see where the possibilities end. I imagine that someday, someone will make a special view for their sick friend, with all their friends contributing funny links to help cheer them up. Maybe a mother will make a Xerpi view for her young daughter's birthday, with everyone in the family pitching in. But there's an even more important question. Who will you build a favorites page with?

That's one of the great things about Xerpi. When the internet was young, writer Howard Rheingold used to attach this sentence to the bottom of every email he sent.

"What it is — is up to us."

Ultimately you can share your view with whoever you want to collaborate with. (Or whoever wants to collaborate with you!) Together you'll combine your best-est links into a grand collection of glorious web-based synchronicity.

Or something like that.

And besides — it's a lot of fun!

I'm happy to say that I am a reformed shopper. I was a spendthrift for quite a few years after college, which did horrible things to my bank account. However, even reformed shoppers still have to buy things, so I use Xerpi to try to make it easier, and more controlled.

At some point I realized that almost everything I researched buying, wanted to buy, needed to buy, or that my friends wanted to tell me about buying, was available on the Internet. I was constantly getting links from friends about the 'next best lipstick' or 'the trench coat I've GOT to have' or "oh here's the toner you need for your printer.' So I got an idea...

I set up a view called "Shopping" on Xerpi, and over time I created the following blocks:

Thinking about buying - all of the things that I've thought about buying, but can't decide on yet. If I leave a link in here for too long, I delete it, figuring I must not have needed it that much anyway.

Ideas for Jill's Birthday Gift - ideas I've found here and there to get my sister for her birthday. If I give myself enough time, and add things in as I think of them over time, I can avoid last minute panic shopping. This works for anyone, or any occasion I need to buy a gift for.

Gifts that people can get for me - I have a lot of friends and relatives that ask me what they can get me for a gift. If I have a few things that I would really love to get already in mind, and saved in this block, I have something to tell them. Best thing is, I will probably really like it.

Things I order regularly - great place to store links for things like office supplies, favorite skin lotion, the socks that fit perfectly, contact lenses, the list goes on ...

Wish list for my fall wardrobe - when I'm spending daydreaming time on the Internet, I can quickly add links to this block and build my 'dream' wardrobe. Over time I refine this too, so when I finally hit the stores, I know exactly what I want.

If I won the lottery - talk about daydreaming! This is a block that provides some stress relief, I can save items that I would buy for myself if I won the lottery. Or would I? Feels so good to delete things out of here -- I don't want them anyway!

Favorite shopping sites - Nice place to store a list of your suppliers. Amazing what obvious resources I can forget if they aren't right there in front of me.

Using Xerpi for this stuff organizes it all so I don't have to spend time worrying about it so much. I can just spend time dreaming. Oh, right, I'm not supposed to enjoy shopping so much anymore...