Yesterday while waiting at the Cancun airport with Aaron, Henry, Mirasol, Nedjo, Owen and Justine, a few of us got to talking about FriendFeed, Twitter and del.icio.us.

Aaron and I are avid del.icio.us users, tagging all sorts of interesting sites. And we follow numerous lists and feeds thus pulling together some great information and redistributing it through the company.

Recently I've been looking into new web2.0 and, I guess web3.0, and social media trends - sites and services that are popping up like mushrooms after a rain. I've found many interesting one and wanted to share a few, and at the same time ask that if you know of anything really cool that you think I might not know about, please send it my way, either by email/contact form or tag them on del.icio.us for:gregoryheller

From the people who brought you the enormously popular The Machine is Us/ing Us.

I watched a great Google Tech Talk lecture by David Weinberger on his new book Everything is Miscellaneous.

7th Most Popular Amazon Tag

I ran across this post on O'Reilly about tagging - it referred to our Amazon tagging experiment with our Defective by Design campaign (for the Free Software Foundation). I ended up poking around Amazon and discovered that we are currently the 7th most popular tag now on Amazon - after one alert to our membership.

Time magazine named YouTube "Invention of the Year" saying:

What happened? YouTube's creators had stumbled onto the intersection of three revolutions. First, the revolution in video production made possible by cheap camcorders and easy-to-use video software. Second, the social revolution that pundits and analysts have dubbed Web 2.0. It's exemplified by sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg - hybrids that are useful Web tools but also thriving communities where people create and share information together. The more people use them, the better they work, and more people use them all the time - a kind of self-stoking mass collaboration that wouldn't have been possible without the Internet.

Like to count cards in Vegas? Double your coupons? Digg new stories?

Then you'll love to Spike the Vote.

A brief look at YouTube's most popular videos of the day, and what do you find? Cingular with the #1 video?! (391,397 views today alone!) Yep, the name of the video is "Cingular presents: YouTube Underground!" Cingular nabs the "Viral Day Action" award (VD Action) with this clever bit of marketing... a video announcing a YouTube contest for the best band, video or song on the hugely popular video social networking site. And, only a day after Warner Music signed a deal with YouTube - agreeing to a new royalty-tracking system... A good week for the 'Tube.

Every spotted some little niggle when using or administering a Drupal site? Some specific thing that is hard to figure out, or takes two clicks where it should take one?

Dries has had an excellent idea for documenting these UI niggles on Flickr, where a screenshot can be annotated, describing exactly what the problem is.

This is someone anyone can do - and yes, even non-coders :)

There is even a Drupal 5.0 (CVS) site up at that you can use for your screenshots.

Here is how it works:

1. Create a Flickr account. It's free.
2. Take a screenshot of a Drupal (administration) page and tag it with the keyword drupalui (which stands for 'Drupal user interface'). It's important to use the drupalui tag as that is the tag we'll use to pick up your feedback.
3. Annotate the screenshot by adding notes: use the notes to explain
   what you would do differently, what confuses you, what can be explained
   better, what is missing, etc.

An overview of all the annotated screenshots tagged with drupalui can be found here:

• http://flickr.com/photos/tags/drupalui/ (RSS feed)

As you can see, I submitted one example screenshot and annotated it with two notes:

Mashups

are one of my favorite things - synthetic creativity born from the creativity and generosity of open technologists whose works are available on the web to be cross-pollinated with other technologies or datasources to produce brand-new things. It is an ever-accelerating artform in the World Wide Mesh that promises endless Darwinian generative possibilities. Recently the term has been showing up in common culture and the meaning risks dilution. Let's get specific. What exactly is a mashup? Mashups: The new breed of Web app is a new IBM article that provides a great overview of the history and the categories of "mashups" - and bears reading even for Technorati who already get and even contruct mashups.