"I like your roundups of eHub!" says Emily Chang in an email.  All the more reason to keep doing the darned things.  Emily Chang's eHub is a great resource for learning about new or newly highlighted Web 2.0 services and products, but it can be overwhelming.  In the spirit of helpfulness, I've now done a number of weekly summaries of my favorite items on eHub.  The following is the most recent in the series.  No substitute for reading eHub itself, of course, these summaries are just my favorites on the weeks I find time to do a write up.

Listed in order of my excitement this time instead of chronologically:

Social-Mail
Happy day!  Send emails to an RSS feed.  I feel far more comfortable using this tool, a Big in Japan offering, than I do using my previous stand by, mail2rss.org.  Mail2rss.org has worked well for me so far, but the fact that it's remained in "extreme  alpha" mode since I found it makes me very glad to find an alternative.  I use these tools all the time to create feeds for organizations that don't offer them (many in the nonprofit sector, for example.)

Byoms (build your own mobile search)
Not highlighted directly on eHub, but the product of a company that was (Kozuro).  Custom search via IM with support for natural language queries, search sharing and RSS feeds.  Not sure how all of these will work together yet, but those are some of my favorite features for anything - so I'll be watching closely for the June 5th public beta release.  The company says you'll preselect certain sources you want to be able to search, then you can use IM to query those sources on your computer or mobile device.  Sounds pretty cool to me.

Netvibes ecosystem
Makes ajax homepage modules easy to share.  Netvibes is one of the most popular Ajax homepages, which are themselves very poor ways to read anything more than a few RSS feeds with few items in each one (in my opinion).  But it may be one of the most realistic ways to hope for further RSS adoption, and the ecosystem's sharing does help make tangible the portability of feeds. There's an API that's being used to develop new modules, a Word Press plug-in - the announcement of the ecosystem got a lot of coverage throughout the blogosphere.

Farecast
In private beta, this system will use historical data to allow users to predict future airfare offerings.  Have to wonder if another larger vendor will buy this one out, I'm sure that's the idea.  Probably one of the best examples, in fact, of a technology built to flip.  Landing page visual design at least looks totally hip.

Big Blue Saw
You may have read some of the articles around lately about low cost rapid fabrication from CAD files.  Big Blue Saw is an Atlanta based service that offers just such an affordable service.  I've read about this type of thing being the future of manufacturing in the developing world, for now this service is getting press in Make Magazine at least. 

Spinvox
Turns voice mail into text messages or email.  Sounds great, presuming that it works well.  Discussion at MobileCrunch points to two likely problems:  long voicemail messages and the difficulty of trusting a translation to text of the important subtleties in spoken language (like the world "not").  Not having tested this myself, I don't know whether the text messages I get are going to tell me what the names of the callers are as well as my phone's recognition of contacts.  That would be very important.


That's this week's highlights from eHub according to yours truly.  Don't forget to check out the whole site for hours of fun.

Lots of people love Emily Chang's eHub, a site she describes as "a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing."

I find it interesting that it has so many subscribers, almost 4600, and I imagine it's because people like the human editing of selections.  None the less, there are a lot of services posted there and I thought readers might enjoy an even further narrowing of the week's highlights.

From 39 services listed on eHub this week, my 5 favorite are:

Raph Koster has an interesting write up on what he thinks web designers could learn from game designers and vice versa.  There is so much development going on in both realms that the discussion seems quite useful to me.  Highlights include:

Koster says web designers could learn from games that some of the most important features of a successful design are interface, pre-seeded content and identity.

Game designers could learn from the Web 2.0 space about the importance of APIs, simplicity and much more.

There's good dialogue in the comments after Koster's post, too.

Found via one of my new favorite blogs, 3pointD.com

Jon Udell is one of my favorites and in this week's print edition of InfoWorld magazine his column really raises some fundamental issues.  The article was available a week ago online but just now caught my eye and is titled Reinventing the Intranet: Modern social software could be the key to building effective enterprise knowledge systems.  Anyone who's been reading much of Udell's writing will be unsurprised by the basic premise of this piece, but the sense of historical perspective and the succinct questions the article raises about translating what are so far largely consumer oriented services (Web 2.0) into truly powerful tools for organization communication are refreshing and important.

Udell focuses on enterprise vs. general web search and the impact of social bookmarking/tagging.  He asks whether these technologies will be implemented intelligently as organizations shift towards internal use.  "Given the opportunity," Udell write, "people will want to bookmark and tag the resources they publish internally. It’s the easiest way to create, manage, and share dynamic lists of such resources. This system pays for itself in improved personal productivity alone. Everything else is gravy, and there’s plenty of that."  Makes it sound simple, doesn't he?  "Is this the next-generation intranet? If so, we should sort out what we got wrong on the first try, and what we’ll get right this time around."  It's enough to make a person ask why only 14 of us have tagged Udell's article in del.ico.us so far.

Tagging has long been a focus of his column.  Previous articles that set the stage for this week's throwing down of the gauntlet include:

Collaborative Knowledge Gardening from August '04

Tag mania sweeps the web from July '05

Managing Metadata from October '05 (the longest and most technical of the four articles.)

Udell's own del.icio.us archive can also be seen, via his list of self-tagged podcasts.

It only makes sense, really.  There's everything else 2.0, why wouldn't there be church 2.0?  Perhaps this is the saving grace of the phrase Web 2.0.  While I like the phrase "social web," the phrase "social church" seems less impactful than 2.0 and the "social library" sounds downright naughty.

A blog called Church Marketing Sucks has started a series of posts on what Web 2.0 means to churches.  Interesting examples of applications of new web tools in a non-technical context. 

The church is essentially a community, so the ideals of web 2.0 thinking fit nicely in the context of the church. Some say web 2.0 follows the attitude of Jesus. A lot of folks are talking about the idea of Church 2.0. We're definitely not the first or the best to consider web 2.0 and Christianity.

The post also does a good job of explaining what Web 2.0 is.  There's lots and lots of comments, but without a doubt my favorite is this one:

"Latest technology? I've had LiveJournal since 2001! " -Posted by: Sr. Mary Hasta

Have to link over to this, these Web2.0Awards are a fun read and an awesome example of new communication methods in action.  The SEO company that put these together (along with Emily Chang and a gaggle of VCs) will probably get the attention they deserve for bringing major value to their promotional activities.  Not that their award selections are particularly fantastic, but the survey of the field and the interviews are cool. 

Sanjeev Narang, a Washington based consultant, has compiled a huge directory of Web 2.0 web sites organized by category.  There's a lot that isn't listed, but there's a lot that are.  It's impressive.

In exchange for a small donation to the Seattle childrens' literacy organization Page Ahead he'll send you the full list in an Excel file.  That's cool.  Found via Rev2.org

Lists are fun to look at.  There's a slide show of 25 hot Web 2.0 companies over at CNN.  It's a good intro and survey of the field, though the thought of abandoning the term "Web 2.0" in favor of "Next Web" is a loser in my mind.  It's funny to see a company like Skype in the "incumbents" category!

The question of how to define Web 2.0 is a common one, and this weekend I was able to listen to a conversation that covered all the based quite well.  The folks at Jupiter Research have been podcasting for some time now and their most recent release was a conversation between company VP and Research Director Michael Gartenberg, analyst Barry Parr and facilitated by Senior VP of Research David Schatsky. 

Titled "Web 2.0: What Does it Mean for Business?" I found this to be one of the most easy to understand and thorough discussions on the topic available.  It's 30 minutes long and well worth a listen.   The discussion covers the history of the technologies involved, the role of user genertated content and much more.

 I know that some people think the term is meaningless, but I think this podcast is one more bit of evidence that's not true.  The software in use and the societal impacts are real.  I've got my own definition on my site, and I include links to the most up to date search results for other people defining Web 2.0 as well.  This Jupiter discussion is really impressive, though.

According to an English summary by China Web 2.0 Review, a new study by the Internet Society of China makes some interesting observations.

My favorites:
"Awareness of web2.0 is very low, 73.3% of respondents don’t know web2.0." 

26.7% of respondents did know what Web 2.0 was?  If I'm understanding this correctly and the survey asked people if they new the term Web 2.0, instead of asking if they new about blogs, podcasts, etc. - then this seems really high to me!  Can you imagine what percentage of US citizens would say "yah, I know about Web 2.0."  I'd guess way less than 26%.

"87.1% users changed their reading habits after subscribing to rss feeds." 

Finally, a highly pragmatic Web 2.0 service -- Extratasty is a social drink recipe site that lets you find new mixed drinks (or remember the ones you learned and promptly forgot) by search or by tag, see what newfangled concoctions your friends are trying, and rate recipes you've tried as well a see others' ratings. It's got a cool feature that takes the list of ingredients in your bar and narrows the search subset to drinks you can actually make with the materials you have at hand. I vote this tool Most Likely To Be Accessed Repeatedly At Web 2.0 Launch Parties.

[Via Download Squad]

I had a chance to sit (virtually) down with Marshall Kirkpatrick and have a thoroughly enjoyable discussion about  the state of social software and Web 2.0 and its relevance to social change organizations -- please feel free to check out the results on Netsquared (which you should also check out!). Thanks to Marshall for the thought-provoking questions (and for the really cool tag cloud Table of Contents).

One of the big ticket items of the day was the launch of Yahoo Answers, which aims to be every bit the community-powered knowledge base that Google Answers isn't. Both allow you to ask questions, but the latter's queries are answered by pre-screened experts while Yahoo is taking a long-tail, wisdom of crowds approach — any Yahoo member can answer a question, and user ratings determine the "best" of the crop. A reputation system will supposedly weed out the experts from the spammers.

I'm all for the experiment and I'm quite curious to see how it turns out. It would be nice to have a general one-stop shop for this kind of collective Q & A, as opposed to tracking down and poking through various subject-specific user forums. Also, this service has promise to capture the more ephemeral day-to-day questions that don't really fit into any of those forums: "What are some good gift ideas for moms?" "How can I learn to breakdance?" (despite popular opinion, I did not submit that one.)

But, as an experiment, it faces many of the same challenges those user forums have faced (and many failed) before. Greg Linden notes (via Pete Cashmore) that popularity voting does not truth make. Gary Price notes that spam, scams, infomercials and troublemakers are all very likely outcomes for the user community to police on its own, as Yahoo currently has no plans to maintain the knowledgebase. I suppose we'll know if the service becomes successful when Andrew Orlowski starts writing scathing invectives about it.

Alright, so I'm fascinated with lists lately (which is timely as OPML seems to be the Flickr of document standards these days). I'm also curious to know what social services folks are actually using the most, beyond whatever is the latest hot company we're talking about on the blawgs. So, in light of both of these things, I'm kicking off an informal poll: what are your top five favorite social software services currently in use? I'll start:

1. (drumroll, please)... Flickr. Shocking, I know.

2. del.icio.us

3. My Web 2.0 — I tend to store everything in My Web 2.0 and only a subset of things to del.icio.us, but I use both frequently to find cool stuff.

4. Memeorandum — when I need news fast, which is all the time, this is what I use.

5. YouTube is emerging as a new favorite. I like that I can so easily embed video on my own blogs.

A nice solid honorable mention goes to last.fm which is dutifully logging what my media server is playing even when I'm not hanging out on the site finding new music.

Aight, peeps, I'm passing the mic — what are your top 5 faves?