Digg.com has deservable been getting alot of great press lately. If you’re not familiar with Digg, it is a technology news site much like Slashdot, but with an interesting twist. On Slashdot, people submit stories that get read by Slashdot’s editors. If these editors feel the stories are worthy and relevant, they publish the story. If not, the story get burried. Digg however, lets anybody submit a story. The stories are placed into a queue, that Digg readers get to vote on. The 15 stories with the most votes (or diggs) get placed on the home page.

Digg also uses tags to help organize the content and has some great features that let users keep track of the stories they dugg.

In a short 9 months of being online, Digg is almost as big as Slashdot and should overtake Slashdot in a couple of months.

If you’d like to find out more on Digg, Business Week just posted a great interview with Digg founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson that discusses how digg uncovers the news.

I want to is a page that contains a collection of links to web-based applications that can help you accomplish large and small tasks.

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch has a great summary and preview of Windows Live. He is calling it “Much more than an AJAX Desktop” and says that “After what I saw today, I despair for many a silicon valley startup. Seriously”. Apparently there are some great features that include Skype like VOIP to POTS phones, and great email integration (as long as you’re using Hotmail).

Microsoft Team RSS Blog has stirred up quite the controversy over The orange RSS icon. They are looking to create an icon for the upcoming release of IE 7.0 and are asking for input on the five icons they have shortlisted. There has been much discussion on the icon in the comments below the post, but for me, I don’t really care what the icon looks like, but rather what it does when I click on it.

Right now, RSS has a huge usability problem. For example, I needed to write a bookmarklet to subscribe to an RSS feed using Google Reader. If I want to use Bloglines or MSN Start I need to use other bookmarklets. To me, this is the bigger issue that needs to be sorted out. Extensions and Bookmarklets are not the answer IMHO. My dad or brother who I consider to be average computer users don’t know how to install or use bookmarklets or extensions – so I consider these solutions to have their own usablility problems.

I hope the browser makers can get together and collectively agree on how to deal with this usability issue, beyond supporting their own proprietary solutions (ie. integrated RSS readers in their own browsers like Safari and Firefox). I’ll start holding my breath now!

Squidoo is a new, about to be released, Web 2.0 application by a company lead by Seth Godin. Seth is the former VP of Direct Marketing for Yahoo, and the author of a great book called Unleashing the Ideavirus.
Squidoo will be a site that aims to make it easy for you to create, share and discover meaning online. It will be a co-op of experts, called lensmasters, who build lenses on topics they care about. The lensmasters will create pages with links to sites that they feel are extremely relevent about the topics they care about. There is also an interesting revenue model that will help good lensmasters generate cash from their love of their topic(s).

Although the site is not yet available for public consumption, the Squidoo Blog has posted a PDF document called Everyone is an Expert that explains the ideas behind this neat new service.