Luke Wroblewski has written a nice, picture-filled post showing the evolution of Amazon’s tabbed interface. Boy, do they have scalability issues, or what?

This mention of Amazon dovetails nicely with our recent talk about popularity. I say popularity is mostly evidence of attention, and isn’t so bad. Others see it in a more negative light. What Amazon has shown us, I think, is that (at least on the product page) popularity as input to navigation can be very useful, as demonstrated in both user reviews and the “people who shopped for this also shopped for that” feature. I know I often search out what is popular before I make a decision about buying something. Do you?

Richard MacManus of readwriteweb.com and I have written an article on Digital Web entitled Web 2.0 for Designers. It’s the first in a series of articles outlining what we see as the major trends of Web 2.0 and how they can/will affect designers. Don’t take my biased word that it’s a good read: go look yourself.

Comments are appreciated and welcome.

Jeffrey Zeldman writes a disparaging post about tag clouds, or interfaces that reveal the popularity of tags by making them larger, as can be seen here and here.

He says they’re the process and not the music…he also writes about popularity, and how popularity indices like blogdex aren’t quite fair. A very interesting post, well-written, and sure to get you thinking.

By the way, Zeldman’s got comments now. Be sure to read them for this article.

Over at tagsonomy.com, Clay Shirky and friends have set up a site about tagging. Cool! In the first real post (other than introductions from blog members that were insightful in themselves), Clay addresses a question brought up by Tim Bray. The site is barely a few days old, and it’s already very interesting.

Thomas Van der Wal talks passionately about “state” on the web. He points out that designers sometimes forget state along the way to being clever, or perhaps making their own lives easier. A good read, especially worth reading if you’re building a Web 2.0 application.

Gordon over at getluky.net ponders why he is so willing to give personal information to sites like del.icio.us and 43things without much thought to his own privacy. It’s a short, but interesting read.

I found Gordon’s web site because he is doing some very cool work: he’s the creator of Freetag, a set of PHP scripts for setting up a folksonomy on your web site. Yes, you read that right. A folksonomy. I’m hoping with tools like this we’ll be able to soon find out how useful folksonomies are outside of the cool ecosystems that popularized them, such as Flickr.

FYI: I have written an introductory article on folksonomies over at uie.com. If you have been reading some of my other posts on folksonomies, or generally following the topic, nothing will be new to you. What will be new, however, is that this one was edited by someone other than me, and so might make a bit more sense!

Adaptive Path’s Janice Frasier writes optimistically about what going on in web design right now. She says that we might want to consider being amazed or inspired by things like Ajax, folksonomies, and amateurization.

More interestingly, though, is a tidbit found on a follow-up site by the developer Mike Buffington, in which he writes “I’m working on a super-secret project for Adaptive Path”. That is all he says, and since it was written 7 days before Janice’s article links to it, it’s probably Adaptive Path’s way of generating a little pre-release buzz. It looks like they’re learning a lot from 37Signals…who also makes Ajax applications like Basecamp and knows how to generate some pre-release buzz.

Well, consider it passed along.

There has been a tremendous amount of buzz recently about Ruby on Rails, the web application framework created by David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals, with which they built their to do list organizer, Tadalist. Rails, of course, is written with the Ruby programming language.

Apparently some other enterprising folks saw the buzz that Rails was generating, and didn’t want their hard work to be ignored. As a result, the folks who created Rife, a Java application framework, have recently released their version of the todo list called Blablalist. This tongue-in-cheek copy of the tadalist demonstrates that Ruby on Rails isn’t the only way to quickly implement sites using frameworks.

But what about PHP, you ask? The most popular open-source web scripting language, available on every web host with a conscience? Well, there is a new framework called Cake that may be what we’re looking for. It’s only at release 0.2.7, and I haven’t tried it out yet, but I’m anxious for the opportunity. After all, I have zero time to invest in learning a new language like Ruby, or immersing myself into the wide expanse of Java.

Words spoken are representations of our ideas for an immediate audience. They take little investment and no confidence.

Words written are representations of our ideas for a future audience. They take a temporal investment and the confidence to believe that our ideas are worth something.