David Pogue's blog entry, "Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0?" starts out talking about why companies aren't using Web 2.0, but specifically he is discussing business blogging and the advantages of transparency and open communication with your customers.

We all know, intellectually, that no matter what image a corporation tries to project, it's made up of ordinary people with personalities, insecurities and lives. But because the marketing and P.R. teams work so hard to scrub, control and package a company's image, the public ordinarily sees none of that human side.

When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, it makes contact with its public in a more casual, less sanitized way that, as a result, is accepted with much less cynicism. Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.

This is Cluetrain Manifesto stuff. Read that if you want to be convinced of the bigger picture of transparent businesses.

Michael Wesch is an Asst. Proffessor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. He created the video entitlted, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us," presumably for his students. Ignore the title for now and just make it through. Imagine that you're a student, not a web designer or developer, and that this is your anthropology teacher talking about something you're pretty familiar with, using the web and sites like flickr and youtube. Now go...

Did you pretend to be an undergrad? What did you think? Do you recall any teachers investing this kind of effort to instruct? I know I haven't.

The video is well executed and is cleverly self referential, as is the title itself. This is such an effective method for education because he's using the medium, the object of his lesson, to demonstrate the point of the message. On a number of levels he's referencing the participatory nature of web services to teach about the phenomenon of the participatory/mashed-up web (web 2.0). Educators should strive to think about teaching this way. It's active and engaging and is the kind of stuff that just might inspire students to do more with what they get out of school. Very cool.

Got email today about The Amazon Affiliates aStore Beta, which will let affiliates create quick and dirty stores using Amazon's inventory. Their design tool lets you select featured products and then use keywords to add categories of products. Then you can modify the colors and point people to the store or serve in an iframe.

Here's the nice design interface. Looks a bit like a wireframe.

I'd been thinking about separating my cycling blog and events calendar from urlgreyhot, so I quickly threw together a cycling aStore to see how it works. Check it out at LOVE+SPROCKETS.

Pretty quick. Took me about an hour to throw that together.