literature-map lets you search for authors within literature (and philosophy).The application visualises the proximity of the authors/thinkers in a relational network. Authors like Jelinek, Houellebecq, Foucault, Eco for example, are bunched in tag clouds based on affiliations and influences.

The literature map is part of gnooks, 'a self-adapting community system' to search for books and writers. gnod in turn is 'a search-engine to find things you don't know about.' You can search music, books, movies or find like-minded people. The entire system leads back to the 'virtual playground' of Marek Gibney.

Following the Delicious cloud one can view the most popular links by age: 24 hrs. or 48 hrs. In both cases a " 'NEW' site is a site not present in del.icio.us before yesterday." The all time popular links are also worth a look. Feeds are available. Great source for bloggers.

Del.icio.us has just  turned 2 years old yesterday. A wonderful free service for bookmarking all your favourites or to browse that delicious universe.  Strong current has a large cloud on del.icio.us.

OhmyNews.com (in its English version) is on the way to pose a challenge to top-down news dissemination. The user-generated news of thousands of citizen journalists working in a transnational collaboration poses a refreshing change and challenge to the old media, sometimes regurgitated via blogs. There are many participating global citizens reporters and some well known contributers. Just register and make the news!

"We Media, How audiences are shaping the future of news and information" written by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis is a very comprehensive paper on the evolving participatory new media ecosystem. At all levels it provides orientation or in-depth analysis for bloggers, digital communities of practice or (citizen) journalists. There is a lot about building trust and credibility as the new currency of new media. It is a long, but very readable piece of work.

"Media futurists have predicted that by 2021, 'citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer.' Mainstream news media , however, have yet to meaningfully adopt or experiment with these new forms."

The U.S. Media Center has the vision "to be the global leader in providing intelligence and insight into the future role and use of media and enabling technology."