• The Behance Network is an interesting online hub for the wide variety of designers and other artistic creators out there. It allows you to upload designs for your own portfolio and get feedback from the community and also has job listings and a collaborative tips section that encompasses everything from print to digital to web design. I am not a designer but I spend quite a bit of time around a few of them so I have started to appreciate design work a lot more than I used to and I think this site is really pretty cool for stumbling upon a variety of designs that are very well done. I cannot speak to the benefits of the job listings or the tips sections as I am not in the industry, but it seems to me that they are very well laid out and easy to navigate. if you are not in the industry, check out the site and just peruse the galleries for some really cool designs! Or if you are a designer, try out their portfolio features and let me know what you think!

• A few weeks ago, I was cruising the internet and I stumbled upon an ABC News site called i-Caught that is a place for everyday people to upload their own media for possible inclusion in ABC stories. It is essentially the same model as every other video sharing site out there except this is targeted specifically towards developing news and relevant information. I have not been able to figure out yet what level of censorship they have, but I’m sure that the site is moderated to some extent. There is a page called TalkBack that allows users to submit questions and content to specific ABC programs for contribution or comment. I think this site is a pretty good idea from the MSM as it tries to adapt to the YouTube era. However, I do wish they had spent a bit more time of designing the site…it is very nice that the ads are limited and all focus is on the video content but check out the i-Caught logo. It looks exactly like what you see on sites that make fun of Web 2.0 logos, like this logo generator or this page of hilarious mock logos. Other than that, this site is a pretty cool idea…there are others out there too, like this one from MSNBC, but I think ABC has the best handle on how to harness the community. In fact, if you look at the actual URL for their site, it is http://ugv.abcnews.go.com/ I’m guessing the “ugv” at the beginning means User-Generated Video…kudos to ABC on slowly starting to figure out the world of social media.

• I am a big fan of the band The Spill Canvas and a few weeks ago I went to their website to buy their latest album (see RIAA, just because I download albums I would never buy anyway doesn’t mean that I don’t ever send my wallet over to the band I like!). Anyhow, I was poking around the site and found a really cool page promoting their album which happens to be called “No Really, I’m Fine.” Well on this page, there is a a bar that asks “How are You?” and when you enter in your response, it will display it to other site visitors as “No Really, I’m yourresponse”. (see screenshot to understand a bit better) While this does not really have off-site impact, I think it is an awesome way to get fans engaged in the site. It is a page out of the twitter playbook that asks “What are you doing?” but it tailors perfectly with the band’s site.

• AbbyMe is an awesome site that allows you to send audio messages to people’s phones by typing in whatever text you would like them to hear. The computer voice is actually pretty good and you can enter in more than one number at a time so if you need to send a quick message to lots of people it makes it very easy to do. Of course, I’m sure the most common application is for prank calls (4 of my coworkers and I just finished up a 30 minutes funny phone call round of sending each other very inappropriate messages…all in good fun, of course!) but it could have some really good real-world uses as it gets fine tuned. If they develop a mobile version of it, it could be used to send audio text messages, etc. Definitely a fun site to play around with that someday might develop into something super useful!

• Yuxt is a social video-sharing site that makes for a really easy way to share and host your own video clips or those that you find on other sites. A simple drag-n-drop uploading feature effectively eliminates any learning curve for getting used the site’s format. A few weeks ago I wrote about Vod:Pod, a different video sharing site that is also pretty interesting, but the thing I love about Yuxt’s site design is the clean, no-frills interface. Also, a feature which is nice is the “Lounge” tab in the site’s main navigation box which links you to hosted video collections that are grouped into great categories like “Top 10 Collections”, “YouTube Top Rated”, etc. I came upon this site because I got linked to what I believe (and apparently a lot of other people believe this s well, since it is the top rated collection on the site) is the best collection on the site. It is a collection of music videos with the lyrics in various fonts timed to the music…seeing is believing.

• One day, as I was delving into the never-ending stream of del.icio.us tags, I stumbled across an interesting graphical compilation of site logos that claims to be the ‘Complete Web 2.0 Directory.‘ It is a site that is nothing but logos of every website that has been deemed to be ‘web 2.0′ (what the editors have decided to use as a standard definition for web 2.0, I have no idea…but I guess we just have to accept their judgments on faith alone.). While I can’t really think of any direct functional purpose I would have for frequently using the site, it is pretty interesting to just look through all the logos and check our some of the sites. The ‘About‘ page states that as of today, there are 1,635 logos displayed on the site, which does make it a pretty large database. It is fun to poke around, so check it out..to navigate, use the small, thin purple ‘Down’ tab on the bottom left.

• Mango is a new site designed to teach you a new language via the internet. Most people think, “Oh yeah, I can get some software and do that.”…but Mango is free, which makes it available not just to those people with enoughdiscretionary income to subscribe, but rather opens the doors for anyone to learn the basics of a different language. As of today, they have 11 languages, each with 100 lessons included! It has an incredibly easy-to-use interface that provides audio and visual instruction without having to wait for buffering…buffering…buffering…

• A lot has been written about Sketchcast in the last week or so, but I’ve just started to fool around with it, and I think it is pretty awesome. While I would never consider myself to be any kind of artist, Sketchcast is an easy way to draw out quick sketches of ideas and then embed or link to them from anywhere. Basically, you start recording and then it records your brush strokes as you draw on the ‘canvas’ of the site and then you can watch you playback and publish it for people to see or for you to embed on your own site. I’ve embedded my first sketch as a little experiment! This another great new tool for the online communications world!

• Natuba is a social aggregation site that you can build using your updates to YouTube, Twitter, LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, flickr, MySpace, TypePad, Live Spaces, and Photobucket. It provides you an admin page to add your services and customize your page which then provides a one-stop shop for your ‘lifestream’ updates. This is really a pretty cool, easy-to-use site for those who want to aggregate their information from multiple services. However, there are a couple of drawbacks including the lack of facebook integration and lack of support for self-hosted sites (Wordpress, etc). In their defense, you can add any custom RSS feed (including that of a self-hosted site), but it just isn’t quite the same… Anyhow, this is a very straightforward service that is great for a basic lifestream source, with very easy service integration. Check out my test page here.

• Clearspring.com is a site where you can create your own web-based widgets for embedding in your blog, website, profile, etc. The site gives you the option of creating a Flash, web site, or image widget and does a good job of walking you through the process of constructing your widget. I haven’t actually created a full widget, but from my experience of just poking through the process, it seems to be the easiest site I’ve found for creating your own widgets without relying on other developers.

• Twitterment is a really cool site that allows you to compare subject popularity in Twitter updates. It is very similar to Google Trends, except it only includes the frequency of keywords used in worldwide Twitter updates. It also shows a short zeitgeist that displays the up-and-coming terms as well as the declining terms. An example for comparing ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’ shows a basic graph showing hourly and daily summaries. A pretty cool site to briefly check out trends on Twitter; still in beta, so definitely some room to grow. (Follow me on Twitter here)

• Twittervision provides a worldwide map that displays Twitter updates from around the world (obviously, not every single update is shown, just a steady stream of them). This is available in a Google Maps frame, or as a 3D view based in Google Earth (requires Flash 9). I recommend the 3D view option (located in the upper left corner). Also, this site has a facebook application for embedding this advanced Twitter map into your facebook profile; a pretty cool tool if you like to follow all sorts of Twitterers. (Follow me on Twitter here)

• A new facebook application that is pretty astounding is Socialistics, a statistical analysis app that provides really cool graphs and tag clouds based on a variety of variables within your friend’s network. You can get a cloud based on 5 different factors: Popularity, Proximity, Cities, Birth Year, and Relationships and you can view graphs based on 13 variables ranging from Current Location to Number of Wall Posts. This is the most advanced social graph statistical engine I’ve seen yet, and definitely the cleanest interface, as well. There are also a few features still in development, including the creation of study groups and supgroups. All-in-all, this app is the best way I’ve found to analyze your social graph, especially if you have a lot of friends with varying data…now if only facebook would add application support to its groups, this type of tool could be used to do amazing things for tweaking group content or offerings based on detailed demographic data. Get the Socialistics application here.

• This last addition is technically not a web-based tool, but rather an Easter Egg found inside Google Earth. If you zoom into the US and hit CTRL+ALT+A for Windows or Command+Opt+A on a Mac, a window will pop up giving you an option to fly either an F16 or an SR22 prop plane and a multitude of international airports to launch from! It takes some time to get used to the controls and get the hang of it, but this is probably the coolest hidden feature I’ve ever encountered on a program, because it allows you to fly through Google Earth terrain, 3D buildings, etc. Thanks to Mashable for the heads-up!

Microsoft has released a beta version of its newest search feature: Tafiti. Essentially, this is a visual search tool built on Microsoft Live Search and Microsoft Silverlight technology: rather than just listing out our search results, Tafiti creates an interactive searching experience that allows you to search for websites, images, news, books, and RSS feeds at the same time with a stunning graphical interface that is Vista-like in its design.  It features drag-and-drop saving of search results, labeling and compiling tools and also presents an option for “Tree View”, which lacks a bit in the practicality sector, but is very aesthetically pleasing.  Basically, a tree grows and each branch has the text of a web result on it; you can narrow or widen the tree as you want in order to narrow or broaden the search criteria.  This also comes with a full-screen option and scroll buttons to rotate the tree.  I’m not sure when I would ever use this view while actually searching for something, but it sure makes it look good!  This is definitely one of the more fun search applications, I’ve ever encountered.

The best review I’ve encountered for this new tool is from Matt Dickman, which provides a walkthrough of Tafiti’s features. I recommend checking out his site and watching his review below. I will agree with many of his sentiments about it, especially that using Silverlight as the base program fro this search tool could prove to be the Achilles heel of an otherwise awesome program.

In order to make Tafiti a truly viable option in the search engine world, Microsoft will either have to allow it to be adapted to Adobe Flash or seriously step up its distribution of Silverlight. Another user option that would be amazing, but will surely never materialize would be the option to select your own search engine to return your results. Perhaps someone will develop a plugin in the future that would allow such a switch. But all-in-all, Tafiti is an awesome tool that shows that Microsoft is still capable of revolutionizing a field if it really tries! It seems that when companies position themselves at the top f thier market, they slow down thier innovation and trade risky, revolutionary ideas for tame, mediocre, and basic features. Perhaps Tafiti is the beginning of a shift back to the trendy cutting-edge of user experience…maybe Microsoft will someday decide to give Apple a run for its money with design and usability, but I think it will be an uphill battle for them.

Courtesy of Matt Dickman at Techno//Marketer

This week, I’ve come across quite a few high quality sites, but I’ll only go in depth on a few of them here and perhaps detail others later in the week.

• Ziki is a new take on a personal homepage, with it’s own flavor. Rather than try and position itself as a one-stop-shop of online content for your browsing, where it would be up against some stiff competition from iGoogle and Netvibes, Ziki is instead your personal homepage for other people to access. It contains a short bio about you, and provides links to your blog/website and your profile on a multitude of other sites, including LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, etc. In addition, after you tag your own page with up to five keywords so that other Ziki users can network to you, you can turn on the search engine optimization feature. Ziki guarantees the placement of your Ziki page in the top results on all the major search engines, so when other people search for you, they will land on your Ziki page and be able get basic information about you and navigate to all your other profiles across the internet without having to dig further into the search engine results. Definitely a cool tool for those who want to be easily accessible via the internet! For an example, check out my Ziki page here.

• Jimdo is an awesome new tool for building your own website, if you are looking for a solid non-blog feel. It is by far the easiest layout editing I have ever seen for building a site, including software-based programs. You navigate to your page, login, and you see a toolbar pop out on the right side with editing options and tools, but the main part of the screen still looks exactly like your site. As you edit, the changes are visible and all the time, you know exactly what your site looks like as you edit it, without page refreshes or constant saves. As far as simplicity and usability are concerned, Jimdo is truly amazing. You can even edit the HTML aspects of your site’s modules…I have not tested it for embedding objects or tracking codes, but it seems that it would not be hard to do. If you are looking for a place to build a quality personal website without the hassle of programming and ease of use that puts all other sites to shame, I highly recommend Jimdo.

• Collectivex is a really great tool I stumbled upon this week that allows you to essentially create your own small social networking site or an online information hub for a group. You create what they call a ‘Groupsite’ and invite others to come join your group, and with customizable privacy settings, you can make your group as open or as exclusive as you want. Once on your groupsite, members can share files, photos, messages, etc, and there are plenty of upgrade options available a la carte including ad removal, increased storage, etc…and an enterprise edition if you want to use the site to deploy a company intranet. This is really a great site if you want a non-public, group specific way to keep everyone up to speed and plugged in to to information!

• Tractis has been around for a little while and has made its way around the blogosphere a few times, but I just recently started looking into it features and services. Tractis offers an easy interface to construct contracts that you can even personalize with company logos and colors. Also, the site has a large database of templates that are easily searchable in order to quickly find a fit for your needs. With the collaborative features, multiple people can work on a single document and can also subscribe to an RSS feed to track changes or updates to a document. This is a really promising site that I haven’t had a whole lot of time to fully explore (or any contracts to build, for that matter) but it appears to be an awesome online tool for small businesses or entrepreneurs that could potentially save lots and lots of money by doing contracts by themselves.

I am delineating a ‘functional’ site from a ‘content’ site, because most people use them for drastically different purposes. A functional site is one that provides services to you by either filling a need that you have had, or creating a need that you did not even know you had, whereas a content site is one you use to educate yourself in some manner. For example, most people now get directions for car trips from sites like Google Maps or Mapquest, but to learn about cartography, you might go to a resource from EarthSensing that explores all aspects of the science.

This sometimes gets blurred in the world of social networking sites with groups springing up that are essentially information hubs that just happen to be housed on a networking site. For example, Facebook would be considered a functional site, but users can create user-driven content sites within Facebook by launching groups that foster discussion and provide information to promulgate to others who might be interested in the same topic. The difference between these two kinds of sites is very important because they fill two different parts of the internet and people interact with the two of them in vastly different ways, as well.

That was simply my clarification of the different types of sites I keep track of as I delve into the annals of knowledge housed on the interwebs! Anyhow, I recently discovered two very excellent content sites that are worth mentioning:

• Web Strategy by Jeremiah: This is a blog hosted by Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategist in San Fransisco. He provides an excellent look into the world of web-based marketing, but not just from a standard ‘make-a-flashy-ad-and-hope-for-good-click-rates’ angle; he analyzes the best way to create, present, and distribute content. The key word there is ‘content’, rather than ‘product’ because everything revolves around how you come in contact with the market and its members. This blog really is awesome for examining how online strategies are changing the way people interact with others and with the market, so I highly recommend adding the RSS feed to your reader!
• TED: TED is the website for the annual Technology, Entertainment, Design conference in Monterey and its very-appropriate tagline is ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’. This is a really unique conference that has spawned some off-shoots, but the original remains exceptional. Each speaker at this conference only speaks for 18 minutes, but the content is incredible and ranges from art to politics to research methods to music. This site houses an archive of over 100 talks that have been given at the event over the years, and more is being added all the time. Much of it is very though-provoking, and I highly encourage everyone to check out a least a couple videos on any subject. My favorite video at this point is this lecture given by Hans Rosling about the shifting dynamics of the world’s economies, populations, and other vital statistics…but he does it in a very engaging way that keeps a visual appeal with incredible virtual models.

• Vod:pod: This site is similar to del.icio.us int hat it allows you to tag and catalog videos you stumble across on the internet. You can add a button to your browser that picks up the video from the site you are are and puts in on your Vod page…and from there you can add videos to your ipod, share them with friends, and do other things like create your own ‘Top 10′ list. Also, there is a tool that allows you to feed your newly tagged videos to your blog or website with a personalized widget, similar to the del.icio.us tool I have in the bottom right of this page.
• Netvibes: Though still in beta, this site is a pretty amazing tool for creating a personalized homepage. It is very similar to iGoogle but Netvibes allows you a lot more control over the look and feel of your page…you can have RSS feeds and widgets just like iGoogle, but you have much more freedom as far as layout is concerned. Also, there are dozens of themes you can apply to your site, rather than the 5 o 6 that Google offers…and you don’t have the large Google header at the top of the page. It is very rare that I criticize the Great Google but as far as personalized homepages go…well, I think I may switch mine to Netvibes.
• Sonific: Sonific creates a ‘Songspot’ based on your musical preferences that you can then post on any other website or blog. Also, it is focused to indie music and smaller record labels, but the quality is high, and the high quality tagging of the songs makes searching a snap.
• Meebo: Meebo is probably one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. You can login to just about any IM client on their webpage and chat directly through their emulation. This can also be hosted on your own website to allow others to chat through Meebo. It is approximately 10,000 times easier and more user friendly that AIM Express, the Java-based client for online access to your AIM account.