How many times have you made fortunate discoveries quite by accident? That's serendipity--the good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries. The world is indebted to Horace Walpole, the English author, for coining that word from "Serendip", the old name for Sri Lanka, and using the newly-minted word for the first time in his letter of January 28, 1754.

I stumbled upon Clipmarks quite serendipitously yesterday as I was figuring out how to enhance my Firefox browser. Actually, I downloaded the Firefox browser some two weeks ago because I thought my Internet Explorer 7 (IE7)was corrupted. I couldn't use the IE7 for browsing with my new DSL connection but with my dial-up, I could. It took an IT guy from the office to adjust the settings properly. After that, I hardly used my Firefox again, until yesterday.

If you are a sponge for news and knowledge but don't have the time to keep up with all the information constantly turning up, I'm sure Clipmarks will grow on you as it had to me. The clips you get and read from their homepage live up to the site's tag line: bite-size highlights of the web. More importantly, these are clippings chosen personally by a growing user community (I became a member yesterday). It is my view that determining which content in a particular page is compelling and interesting is best done by people than by machines through some complex algorithm.

Blogging has brought me to places in the web that I never thought existed before. I am even more awed now with the range and power of the many free tools available in the web waiting to empower anyone who'd care to search for such gems in cyberspace.