Dontclick.it is an interesting UI experiment that is worth a… click. Check it out.

Speaking of neat UI stuff Rico is a set of great looking Ajax empowered UI widgets. Could come in handy.

It has an interface that’s worthy of discussion. I like the chances they are taking. Don’t agree with them all (accessing the sources list from the Start header doesn’t work for me), but still – it’s nice to see its evolution.

particletree: Kevin Hale: The Importance of RSS:

…When we launched this site, we knew that the tutorials and information we were gathering and creating were good—that they would be somewhat valuable to the web development community. The problem was that we didn’t want this useful, time-sensitive information to sit around for days (or even weeks) waiting to be picked up by search bots and then found by people accidentally or when they were desperate for a solution.

So I proposed that we turned to del.icio.us to expand our readership. Every time something went up on the site that I felt would be good enough for a wider audience, I added it to my del.icio.us account with the appropriate tags and descriptions. Our goal was to try and get a feature on del.icio.us/popular by the end of July and to our surprise, we accomplished it in less than a week. After two weeks of diligent posting and tagging, Google gave us a little over 50 referrals while del.icio.us gave us over 700.

I think the reason del.icio.us is so successful at bringing the appropriate audience to good material is because they track the changing web by using people to calculate what is essentially “page rank.� They get access to decent fuzzy logic for a fraction of the cost and the democracy of the system allows anyone to get their idea of what deserves face-time into the system almost immediately.

Basically, tagging systems are wonderful breeding grounds for the principles contained in Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. They do a great job of gathering Salesmen, Mavens and Connectors all in one place. Mavens stalk the new entries on the front page and certain tag pages to filter through the chaos and find the latest treasures. The RSS feeds act as a sort of technological bridge/pseudo-connector to get the information to the real Connectors and Salesman. From what I’ve noticed, a good idea can make it into del.icio.us/popular in about 5 days, a good Salesman/Connector/Maven like Dave Shea or Jeffrey Veen can get a good idea into del.icio.us/popular in less than two hours.

Tag mania sweeps the Web | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-07-20 | By Jon Udell:

When I first wrote about social tagging services last year, Flickr (for shared photos) and del.icio.us  (for shared bookmarks) were among a handful of tag-enriched applications. Nowadays you can’t turn around without tripping over a new one. Three newcomers are My Web 2.0, Rojo 2.0, and Swik.

…Is this a fad or a real breakthrough in information management? I say both. Tagging has attained the elusive cachet of coolness. New taggers feel an initial thrill of empowerment. Venture capitalists, sensing the buzz, are looking to amplify it.

When the novelty wears off, though, I think that tagging will have altered the information landscape in a fundamental way. Here’s an example: I’m often asked a question that begins with “Do you have any pointers to … ?” The answer to such a question is a set of URLs. Two years ago, I would have collected those URLs and transmitted them in the body of an e-mail. Nowadays I’d collect them using del.icio.us tags and send only the del.icio.us URL.

From its site:

• 5 snapping modes.
• Support for BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats, with selected color depth and quality settings.
• System-wide hotkeys.
• Clipboard copy/paste.
• Printing.
• Auto-saving, auto-printing.
• Auto-start with Windows.
• Minimizing to system tray.
• An auto-extending list of fixed sizes, perfect for snapping images for icons and glyphs. 
• A zoom tool for magnifying selected parts of the screen.
• A ruler tool for measuring screen objects lengths.
• A color picker showing screen colors with separated RGB parts.
• Fast picture viewer.
• Adding frames and mouse pointer images.
• Multilevel configurable undo and redo.
• Multilingual versions.
• Configurable user interface.
• And more…

And it’s free.

That counts upon what you mean by “peak”. For Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! (and I’m paraphrasing) its when blogging goes from being “the new thing” or “the thing that changes/reinvents X” to just another part of daily life for a bunch of people. He wants to know when you think that will happen.

My answer – and it will jar my DIY readers – just look at Xanga, LiveJournal, and MySpace. That day has already come for millions.

We may thumb our noses at those communities, but it is there you will find folks blogging as just another part of daily life.

However, I don’t think we are even close to peaking in terms of innovation or in raw numbers of adopters.

It’s nice to be mentioned as one of “today’s leading online community sites” with such good company! But the session is in California Oregon and in just a couple weeks. There is just no way I can make it to this:

O’Reilly Open Source Convention: Open Source Community and Citizen Journalism Communities with Drupal – August 1-5, 2005 – Portland, OR.:

In the past year, Drupal has gone from a secret weapon used by those “in the know” to powering many of today’s leading online community sites. E.g. Spread Firefox, Planet Cocoon, BaitCar, Urban Vancouver, Philly Future, BlufftonToday, etc. At this BOF, learn from the Drupal community and Drupal entities like Bryght and Civic Space

about the Drupal best practices for creating online community. All are
welcome including Drupal users and developers and newbies. We can all
learn from each other.

via Roland Tanglao.

Technorati is not the only game in town when it comes to seeing what bloggers are talking about this minute. Let me share a few sites that as a news and blog junkie I am downright addicted to:

Blog centric replacements for Google News:

Findory and Digg and Blogrunner are amazing. Findory, in particular, comes close to a real Google News replacement. You don’t need a user account to get a great picture of what’s being talked about right now.

Technology Related Aggregators:

Macromedia’s News Aggregator along with the java.blog give me a great picture of what’s being discussed by blogs focused on two of my favorite technologies: Flash and Java.

Link-a-rama:

Bloglines Most Popular Links, Kinja’s Editor’s Digests, del.icio.us/popular, Daypop’s Top 40 (which runs better than ever), and Intelliseek’s BlogPulse give you a grounds eye view of what’s being bookmarked and shared.

Search:

IceRocket, Bloglines, and Feedster each provide search services that compare well with Technorati. IceRocket now has tag search that works.

Like Doc Searls said however – someone needs to take on an objective review of these services.

The numbers of women in IT have actually dwindled these past few years. Read
Burningbird – When we are Needed for some interesting thoughts for discussion:

…In World War II, among the Rosies, there were many who wanted to continue to work, but most didn’t want to ‘rock the boat’, and the few that were willing, made little impact. And so our struggle continued for decades longer than need be because in fateful moment when we could have made such as resounding statement, we took off our work gloves and put on a house dress and quietly returned to the roles society had dictated for us.

As for women in technology, there are those who believe we should shout out when we see disparity, but there are equally as many who believe that doing so will ‘rock the boat’, and this will ‘push’ away the menfolk. After all, no one likes a loud, abbrasive feminist, or a bitch that has no sense of humor. No one likes an angry woman.

But anger is anger, regardless of the sex of the person who is angry. Anger is not nobled by man nor enfeebled by woman. Anger just is.

I’m not even sure who is in the right: those who say compete, and those who say don’t; those who get angry, and those who don’t. All I know is that I’m getting tired of looking at white guys in pictures.

In her piece she links to local Philadelphia blogger Antonella Pavese, who has recently decided to leave IT for Marketing. She quotes its “excessive emphasis on speed rather than quality…, on execution rather than strategy, and the disregard for the human and caring aspects of building applications (e.g., the quality of the user experience rather than the quality of the code).” has as her reasons to move on.

See Groundhog Day for more.

I can’t make it, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be there: the monthly blogger meetup is tonight. It’s always a good time, with great discussion and fun, I hope to see pictures and hear stories afterwards folks.