Since my introduction to the Internet, there have been several sites that served as landmark achievements for a given genre or medium. Google for serach, Amazon for shopping, Digg for technology news. Recently I’ve been happy to add one more item to this list, Mike Davidson’s Newsvine .

Fellow netizen and web advocate Jason and I both agreed on the cold November morning that Newsvine rolled out as a public beta that we were witnessing something very special indeed. You can think of Newsvine as a news aggregation site with a twist. Not only does it offer professional stories from the Associated Press, akin to a major news outlet like CNN.com, it also allows the everyday user to post both links and blog-esque editorial stories.

The environment created by this conglomeration of content is as fascinating as it is diverse. AP stories detailing the days events in Iraq are flanked by editorial articles from both left and right wing users, and every opinion between. Add to this the ability to both comment and chat on any story, and you begin to see the incredible amount of engaging content that Newsvine is serving up at any given moment.

Of course, that sheer quantity of news and opinion can quickly lead to information overload, which fortunately for us, the Newsvine creators have tempered with an array of impressively concise and elegant management tools. The site will automatically track comments on stories you post, which are separated from comments that come after something you’ve written in response to another member’s post.

Would you like to track activity on the site, but not be required to refresh the page every 5 minutes? The Newsvine crew has got you covered: from RSS and JSS to being able to “watch” individual authors that interest you, Newsvine goes to great lengths to bring content to you, rather than forcing you to search around for what peeks your interest.

And naturally underneath all of this you’ll find beautiful site design, highly intuitive Information Architecture, and sexy, sexy javascript.

If you’re looking for your next must-visit site, do yourself a favor and point your browser to www.newsvine.com: you won’t regret it.

So Internet Explorer 6 will run fine on the MacBook because it has an Intel processor, right?

I know this stuff can be complicated sometimes, but come on folks: try to keep up!

Gotta grab bag full of goodies tonight, so fire up your left mouse button and prepare for the barrage.

Ask A Ninja
First up, everybody loves ninjas, so what could be better than a podcast where a real hot-blooded ninja answers questions sent in from the random depths of the Internet? Ask A Ninja! The ninja in question seems to have seen a lot of Ben Stiller, because the influence is unquestionable.

XAMPP
For those in the audience interested in what makes the web tick, and more specifically bending that technology to their twisted will, steer your browser to XAMPP. Credit for this one goes to GraphikJunkie, because he’s found an all in one installer that gives OSX users a one click install of Apache 2.0, PHP4 & PHP5, MySQL, ftp, and SSL. It’s insane when you think about it really. With one download Mac users can have a full featured web server environment on par with most modern sites that conform to the LAMP philosophy.

Craig’s List Redesign
Ok, what other cool stuff is going on? Well, J Philly pointed out a great article on the latest theoretical update of a major web IP: Redesigning Craig’s List. Frankly speaking, this one needs to happen. I don’t doubt Craig’s list relevance or usefulness, but damn: it’s ugly, there’s just no other way to say it.

Wordpress: Extreme Video Plugin
Along with Craig’s List getting a facelift, community members dedicated to the advancement of Wordpress as a blogging engine have come up with a solution to the recent issues caused by google video’s update to their “play this video on your site” functionality. The fix comes in the form of the Extreme Video Plugin, and it gives users a quick tag for not only Google Video, but youTube and Quicktime as well. It’s still in beta form, but it’s a good solution to nothing at all.

So yeah, other than that, no Playstation 3 until November. Does it matter? Probably not.

Signing off!