I'm a few days late (what else is new?) with my Top Ten list, but what the heck. 2006 was an amazing year for the web...and for me, personally. I've gone from being a hard-core freelancing loner to a member of a university web development team. With a little gentle guidance, I've learned how to work as a team player--to share my projects with others and not think of them as "my" projects. (Oops. Well, most of the time, anyway.) Mostly, I've had an opportunity to learn from one of the most talented, dedicated, creative and delightfully quirky groups of people I've ever had the pleasure to meet.I'm a few days late (what else is new?) with my Top Ten list, but what the heck. 2006 was an amazing year for the web...and for me, personally. I've gone from being a hard-core freelancing loner to a member of a university web development team. With a little gentle guidance, I've learned how to work as a team player—to share my projects with others and not think of them as "my" projects. (Oops. Well, most of the time, anyway.) Mostly, I've had an opportunity to learn from one of the most talented, dedicated, creative and delightfully quirky groups of people I've ever had the pleasure to meet. It doesn't get much better than that. So, just to add my voice to the hub-bub, here are the top ten things I thought were wa-a-y cool in 2006. 10. Imagination Cubed: the coolest online user whiteboard around 9. Newsvine: the ultimate news feed reader, with stories sifted and ranked by its community of users 8. Digg: as they say on their site, an "user driven social content website" based on submissions and ratings by members 7. Microsoft's Social Computing Group: okay, they've been around a while, but I just discovered them, so in they go—take a look at some of the really cool projects they're working on 6. BlogPulse: very cool search engine on steroids—analyzes content for trends and other stats that can be presented visually 5. liveplasma: calling itself a "discovery engine," liveplasma maps and visually presents music and film searches 4. Microformats: simple, standardized code for identifying data so it can be shared and published on the web—very awesome 3. Second Life: kind of weird and kind of too cool for words; an honest-to-goodness virtual world you can "live" in 2. YouTube: fun, fascinating, freakish, phenomenol and all those other adjectives people use to describe it 1. Google Labs: so many cool things have come from Google this year that Google Labs has to be the all-time top coolest thing on the web this past year What sites or developments did you think were the coolest in 2006?