From pencil to 2.0 in under two minutes

Kim said it best:

it's the most concise explanation of Web 2.0 seen to date, and is entertaining and inspiring to boot.

This video was created by Michael Wesch, was released on YouTube on January 31st (less then a week ago) has been viewed almost 100,000 times you YouTube alone and has, in Michael's words: "quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere."

As Kim said , everyone with a blog is linking to this because it does an excellent job of communicating visually what we all believe -- that the ability for anyone (insert standard restrictions disclaimer here) to have a voice and potentially an audience is a powerful shift in our world. I'd be willing to bet that technocrati has probably seen a spike in the creation of blogs since this video was released as the uninitiated draw inspiration from the message of power and simplicity Michael delivers.

This would probably also be a good time to give Kim credit for pointing me towards Shelfari in one of his recent posts. If you see a vertical widget on the right hand side of this blog displaying several book covers, you are seeing My Shelf of books (or, at least as much of it as I had the patience to enter). Shelfari allows people to list, comment on and rate their collections of books (and those of other shelfari users) but their innovation, in my opinion, is the excellent concept of using a 'shelf' both as an aesthetic tool as well as a logical and intuitive system for collecting groups of elements for display (in this case, books). Worth checking out.

And thanks, Kim, for the great finds.