It’s not an emote. It’s not a command, it’s nothing other than that other person changing their away message.

Okay first of all, I know I’m a bit of a moron. I’m posting this so that the next person will find it right away. I almost made a complete fool of myself by posting this as a question in Something Awful with the promise of a free account upgrade. Anyways, if you ever see this light gray, text in Google Talk:

It’s the other guy/girl changing their away message.

I don’t generally use IE, but I opened it for some reason, oh to do go to a microsoft site and this is what it looked like after I installed windows, Google Pack, Yahoo Messenger, and Windows Messenger Live:

They’ve given users the ability to tag posts. You can even tag other people’s posts. I tagged this post by somebody about tftp servers as ‘cheese pizza.’ Hmmmmm web 2.0 and cheese pizza, what else do you need?

Ooops!

Here’s how it works.

Open Access News touts a new book, by Yochai Benkler as evidence that Web 2.0 is the Midas of the 21st century. The book, much as its demure title suggests, praises user created content (such as YouTube, videos, blogs) as only one of the most mediocre greatest things to ever happen in the content industry world and will only have a tiny huge impact on publishers everyone.

The book is not only about standardista approved AJAX injected Folksonomy tagged web 2.0 sites with social voting, it is web 2.0: it has a wiki, and can be downloaded with some rights reserved.

Some excerpts:

At the same time, we are seeing an ever-more self-conscious adoption of commons-based practices as a modality of information production and exchange . . . a self-conscious social movement.

. . . we can make the twenty- first century one that offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection.

Wow! A free and new future awaits us. Well, actually it doesn’t have to wait, you can . Enjoy the paradigm shift.