Anybody with a fascination for Web 2.0 websites owes it to themselves to check out how USAToday, the daily national newspaper, has redesigned their website. They’ve basically taken a huge leap ahead into the social news future.

Who knows if that future is a happy one, but it will be fun to watch it evolve, and I’m bookmarking the site - even though I’m not a regular reader nor have I used the site in the past. It’s that compelling.

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Joost is definitely worth checking out. It’s essentially a stand alone application that essentially turns your computer into an on-demand television.

I’m pretty sure Joost uses some sort of P2P technology to download video. But much of the innovation lies in how the technical workings are wisely kept behind the scenes. This is super important as it maintains a simple user experience. As a user, I really don’t care about the bandwidth used or download speed. I just want to watch video.

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The social website construction set Ning recently released a big upgrade and was profiled by Techcrunch. It was really slow for much of yesterday, so I didn’t get a chance to check it out. But I finally got in, and have some thoughts.

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So I wanted to actually mess around with Yahoo! Pipes, which was down most of today, before commenting on it. I finally got in, and it’s pretty slick. It didn’t take much time to figure out how to use it, and make a simple pipe: one that pulls feeds from Megite, Techmeme, and Tailrank, and searches for Apple related news. Here’s the pipe.

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I played around a bit with Technorati’s new WTF service. “WTF” stands for “Where’s The Fire,” not what… you might be thinking. It’s kind of an odd approach, but the more I think about it, it has potential. Rather than a link-submission thing, it’s probably better seen as a user-rated comments / Wikipedia.

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A few weeks ago I signed up with FeedBurner, and I’m continually impressed with their free offerings to the average blogger. The whole RSS feed thing seems simple on the surface but it can be dicey. Text and links is one thing, but what if your feed contains images and sound files? Plus, the importance of a blog’s RSS feed shouldn’t be underestimated. Sites like Technorati search your feed for new posts. Many users prefer to read blogs RSS feed readers (don’t worry, they’ll visit your site if a headline interests them). Anyhow, FeedBurner makes all this technical mumbo-jumbo work, without much effort on my part, so I can just concentrate on writing.

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Warning: if you don’t like cats, Catster isn’t for you. Don’t read this post, and definitely don’t visit the site.

One site on the Mashable list is Dogster, which I’d pounce on if we had a dog, but we have two cats instead (one of which is proudly displayed as my avatar for Technorati and MyBlogLog) so a visit to Catster was in order. The social pet site for cats and cat lovers is made by the same folks behind Dogster.

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You’d think Flixter, a social website focused on movies would be something I’d wait in line for. While competently executed with some stand-out features, overall there are enough things that either bother or confuse me - that I probably won’t return.

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I’m still checking out popular Web 2.0 sites from 2006. I took the plunge with MyBlogLog. It’s a bit of an odd name, but it provides a service that has lots of potential. It starts out as a tracking stat service but it adds some community and social features across blogs.

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Always looking for stuff to blog about, I thought I’d check out some of the websites listed on the Mashable social sites list. I’m coming from a perspective of a new user, along the lines of “will I use this?” or “does this site make any sense?”

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