Well, I guess I’d have five cents. Brian Oberkirch recently interviewed Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path for Weblogs Work. (Link soup?)

Dan talks about Interaction design not just how it relates to software, but to Disney rides, coffee shops, and other everyday situations. Dan’s book, Designing for Interaction, hits shelves this August.

Worth noting is that Dan & Brian were both on the insanely great “Let Go, Jump In” panel at WebVisions last week.

The interview is here.

The other day, I came across a nice introduction to Microformats that you should check out if you’ve never heard of them.

Sorry to pass you off to others’ sites, but I’m busy packing for the WebVisions 2006 conference tomorrow! The aforementioned Dan Cederholm is going to be presenting on Bulletproof Web Design. Can’t wait! Expect more posts from the conference.

Most of what you have heard about MySpace may have come from the news. It’s all the rage with the kids these days and many of them are using it to misbehave. But the premise of the site is wonderfully inventive. You set up a page. You say what you like. You link to your friends’ pages. They leave comments. it’s social networking at its most basic and at its best. Just out of curiosity, I hopped on it while blogging this and right now I’m listening to killer music by my ex-girlfriend’s brother’s band.

Speaking of sites that have sparked controversy, YouTube is also listed in the Newsweek article. YouTube allows users to upload videos. Then they are tagged and linked very similarly to how Flickr photos are. Where YouTube has gotten into a bit of trouble is when users post TV shows and other copyrighted materials. A new site-imposed ten minute video clip limit is a first step at keeping the networks happy.

A few other sites are mentioned, but these two are heavy-hitters that I wanted to add to my list of sites that have succeeded with the new business model.

GMail is Google’s web-based mail application. You probably have heard of this one. It uses the AJAX approach so that it behaves like a desktop application (not the click-refresh-click-refresh model that you’re used to). It also abandons the idea of filing your mail in folders. Instead, you send your old messages to your “Archive” which you can then search quickly using Google’s incredible searching technologies.

Google Maps is Google’s MapQuest killer. It is a mapping/driving directions site that feels like a desktop app, again thanks to AJAX. You’d guess that it’s Flash or something, but no… that’s Javascript, baby.

Google Calendar takes a GMail approach to calendar management. Not only will typing something like “meet with Jon at 9am tomorrow” automatically create the event correctly, you can also publish your calendars to collaboratively share (if you don’t mind your data being on Google’s servers).

Del.icio.us is just plain neat. I’ve never been a big bookmarking guy, always preferring to just type the addresses of where I want to go. However, in doing all this research, I’ve wanted to save a bunch of articles for later. Well, what better way to try out another Web 2.0 app? Del.icio.us stores your bookmarks so you can share them on different machines. Not only that, but when you save a bookmark, you can see how many others have bookmarked it. Then you can read each users’ comments about that link. You can also see what else users that linked to that page linked to (think Amazon’s “Those who purchased X, purchased Y and Z”).

To top it all off, users tag each link with whatever terms they want for easy categorization. This type of tagging, called “folksonomy” (as opposed to “taxonomy”), generates a more accurate way to sort through data since it actually reflects how users are using the content, not how the site admins think they will use it.

Flickr is another site that relies on “folksonomy”, this one an online storage site for photographs. Flickr, while I don’t actually use it, has a rabid following. Flickr has gone beyond just photo uploading. You can create user groups to share and discuss, subscribe to other users’ photo albums, and comment on each others’ collections (and more).

Digg is a site where users submit tech stories. When other users read it and like it, they can “digg it”, which is essentially giving it a thumbs up. Articles receiving a lot of diggs are ranked on the top page, but users can also search for other sites that users digg.

There are many more out there than these, but I just wanted to talk about a few right off the bat. Rest assured that I will provide more.