Web 2.0 - What the heck is it? An idea? A belief? A movement? A purpose? All of the above? Who knows and who cares as long as VC's pay big bucks for "Web 2.0" features 
Can't think of the next big Web 2.0 idea? This may help:
Web Two Point Oh!
I'm amazed at how many different ways poeple are using Google Maps to enhance their existing services or creating new ones that leverage the power of the Google Maps API. Instead of giving examples and talking about them, why not just check out this blog that has an extensive list of Google Maps "mashups".
These are actual conversations with various travel agents. Pretty funny. Makes me think of that scene from Austin Powers when Dr. Evil says, "Why must I be surrounded by friggin idiots?!"
I had someone ask for an aisle seat so that his or her hair wouldn't get messed up by being near the window.
A client called in inquiring about a package to Hawaii. After going over all the cost info, she asked, "Would it be cheaper to fly to California and then take the train to Hawaii?"
I got a call from a woman who wanted to go to Capetown. I started to explain the length of the flight and the passport information when she interrupted me with "I'm not trying to make you look stupid, but Capetown is in Massachusetts. "Without trying to make her look like the stupid one, I calmly explained, "Capecod is in Massachusetts, Capetown is in Africa." Her response ... click.
A man called, furious about a Florida package we did. I asked what was wrong with the vacation in Orlando. He said he was expecting an ocean-view room. I tried to explain that is not possible, since Orlando is in the middle of the state. He replied, "Don't lie to me. I looked on the map and Florida is a very thin state."
I got a call from a man who asked, "Is it possible to see England from Canada?" I said, "No." He said "But they look so close on the map."
Another man called and asked if he could rent a car in Dallas. When I pulled up the reservation, I noticed he had a 1-hour lay over in Dallas. When I asked him why he wanted to rent a car, he said, "I heard Dallas was a big airport, and I need a car to drive between the gates to save time."
A nice lady just called. She needed to know how it was possible that her flight from Detroit left at 8:20am and got into Chicago at 8:33am. I tried to explain that Michigan was an hour ahead of llinois, but she could not understand the concept of time zones. Finally I told her the plane went very fast, and she bought that!
A woman called and asked, "Do airlines put your physical description on your bag so they know who's luggage belongs to who?" I said, "No, why do you ask?" She replied, "Well, when I checked in with the airline, they put a tag on my luggage that said FAT, and I'm overweight, is there any connection?" After putting her on hold for a minute while I "looked into it" (I was actually laughing) I came back and explained the city code for Fresno is FAT, and that the airline was just putting a destination tag on her luggage.
I just got off the phone with a man who asked, "How do I know which plane to get on?" I asked him what exactly he meant, which he replied, "I was told my flight number is 823, but none of these darn planes have numbers on them."
A woman called and said, "I need to fly to Pepsi-cola on one of those computer planes." I asked if she meant to fly to Pensacola on a commuter plane. She said, "Yeah, whatever."
A businessman called and had a question about the documents he needed in order to fly to China. After a lengthy discussion about passports, I reminded him he needed a visa. "Oh no I don't, I've been to China many times and never had to have one of those." I double checked and sure enough, his stay required a visa. When I told him this he said, "Look, I've been to China four times and every time they have accepted my American Express."
A woman called to make reservations, "I want to go from Chicago to Hippopotamus, New York" The agent was at a loss for words. Finally, the agent: "Are you sure that's the name of the town?" "Yes, what flights do you have?" replied the customer. After some searching, the agent came back with, "I'm sorry, ma'am, I've looked up every airport code in the country and can't find a Hippopotamus anywhere." The customer retorted, "Oh don't be silly. Everyone knows where it is. Check your map!" The agent scoured a map of the state of New York and finally offered, "You don't mean Buffalo, do you?" "That's it! I knew it was a big animal!"
This is just pretty damn cool. The boys (and/or girls) over at MidnightCoders.net have put together a AJAX powered chat room that displays the location of the user in the world using Google Maps (click on a room to chat in that room.)
This example demonstrates bi-directional messaging between heterogeneous (Flash and AJAX) clients and WebORB Message Server. The server performs additional processing to geolocate chat users, injects necessary information in messages so users can plotted on the map.
In an active chat room, it can get a little annoying, but I think it's pretty cool nonetheless. Perhaps if the map was zoomed out a little more so that it wouldn't jump around so much. It's kinda cool to see where everyone is chatting from.
[via Ajaxian]
Very recently I learned about a new plugin architecture that Rails supports which allows developers to easily develope plugins for the Rails framework. In the past, when developers wanted to introduce new functionality into Rails, they had to either create a "patch" and commit it using SVN or create a gem that you needed to download and install (much like how you install Rails itself.) The difference now is that there is a plugins folder within the vendor folder to hold all plugins and these plugins allow you to extend Rails beyond its core functionality.
I wasn't able to find any concrete documentation about this new feature (it isn't part of the stable release of Rails, but part of "Edge Rails" which can be obtained from the repository), but I did find this post by Jamis Buck (37signals team) which describes the process of Plugging into Rails.
Some publicly avaible Rails plugins announced in the Ruby on Rails mailing list:
Unfortunately, these plugins don't have official websites (yet), so the best way to learn about them and their usage is to try and search the Ruby on Rails mailing list archives.
UPDATE: I found the wiki page with a bunch of plugins that people have written so far. http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Plugins