Web 2.What?

As much of an early adopter I am, I sometimes miss the boat on some big crazy trends. One of them was the iPod. No, I’m not kidding. I just got my first iPod ever (a pink nano video) about 2 months ago.

Boy am I ever glad I held out. I mean I feel like I missed years of music listening opportunities, but having video capabilities is just amazing. My favourite thing to do is load up some video podcasts and head to the gym. Before I used to watch TV at the gym and get de-motivated during commercial breaks (Poor attention span sometimes), but now I can watch the content I choose interruption and commercial free!

Here are a few of my fav podcasts (both video & audio) on a variety of topics:

• Ask A Ninja - A classic! It’s a silly show for Ninja enthusiasts.
• Generally Speaking Production Network’s Lost podcast - All Lost fans need to listen to at least one podcast & this one I particularly enjoy!
• Jaffe Juice - Conversation marketing podcast with Joseph Jaffe of crayon. Always loaded with useful information (in fact, that’s how I found out about the GSPN Lost podcast) and he’s got a delightful accent as well which always helps!
• Six Pixels of Separation - fellow Canadian Mitch Joel talks about social media and all sorts of cutting edge marketing stuff
• Wired News - Alt Text Podcast. Seriously, host Lore has made me burst out laughing numerous times. The first episode I listened to, he was dissecting the lyrics to “La Isla Bonita” specifically how it makes no sense.

This is really just a random sampling… but I’m always on the lookout for great new podcasts (especially video ones!) Please tell me your favourites in the comments…

While Facebook still dominates social networking, and LinkedIn/Plaxo for the professional world, as the excitement of social networking peters off (which may not be for a while) we’ll see Facebook slowly fade out, and niche sites slowly take over (though not as noticeably)

If you look closely, a lot of niche sites are already established. However these sites are driven by interests, not mass appeal, so unless you stumble across one, or hear about it from someone else, you may never find them.

One I found today that I’m already in love with is Group Recipes. It’s social networking for foodies and I love it for a few reasons:

1. It’s all about sharing recipes - something foodies love to do!
2. It allows you to not only share, but tag, rate and post your own recipes for a killer online recipe database.
3. When you sign up, you rate a bunch of different ingredients/food types to determine your tastes, that way the content you see is relevant to you.

I think Group Recipes will do well in the ‘foodie’ space. What niche SN sites do you love??

Have you checked out all the browser bling Firefox has lately?

There’s always new stuff going up, and very cool stuff too. Today when loading up my new computer, I threw on the StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter tool bars you know… All the usual.

However, then I searched around, just to see what’s out there. Now what I think will likely become my favourite and most useful tool is BlogRovr. You can individually add blog feeds you like, or upload your OPML file from your reader (might sound complicated-but it’s dead easy. In GoogleReader I just clicked ‘manage subscriptions’ and then ‘Import/Export’ and then BAM! Good to go…)

So anyway, BlogRovr ‘fetches’ your feeds and pops up relevant blog activity when you visit a new page. For example I went on to Twitter, and the tray appears in the bottom corner of the screen with three blog posts talking about Twitter. If you’re a information junkie, distraction-loving multi-tasker like me, it’s pure genius!

It’s only been a day, so I’m still in the honeymoon phase, but I’ll give you an update in a few weeks or so.

This is social media at its strongest!

I logged into my Twitter account today to see this eye-catching promo box saying “Super Tuesday Google + Twitter” I clicked through to discover this:

If you can’t see what’s going on too well, I’ll break it down:

The right column shows the percentages of votes by state and the leader is highlighted. You can switch it up between Democrats and Republicans.

Underneath that and the notice about joining up with Twitter is an aggregate list of news coverage of the election.

And then the coolest part, comes in the larger right-side panel: Where every time someone ‘tweets’ about the election, it dynamically appears on the map at that person’s physical location.

It’s social, it’s community-oriented (and in this case, Google is tapping into Twitter’s loyal community base) and it’s providing valuable information to the masses.

I’m officially impressed!

Twitter - for those who like to say a lot in as little words as possible. (140 at a time, specifically.)