This weekend I watched an amazing video from Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs at a Ted Conference, and what really hit home is how many people struggle to be new media douchebags in a web 2.0 world. If you're the kind of person who wants to have 50,000 twitter friends, be a power Digg user, make the front page of  Techmeme, get mentioned on Techcrunch, avoid getting mentioned in Valleywag, and it isn't filling your wallet, then you are a Web 2.0 Weenie Living on Bullshit Social Media

 I am fortunate enough to spend a lot of time looking at various online products and services in the development stage, mostly of the Web 2.0 variety, meaning they use one or more of the principles in the Web 2.0 set of practices.  It's been going on 4 years now and what's fascinating to me, despite the enormous amount of knowledge that we've accumulated on how to create modern Web applications, is how many of the same lessons are learned over and over again.

Wouldn't it be handy if we had a cheat sheet that combined many of these lessons into one convenient list?  In this vein of thinking, I decided to sit down recently to capture are some of the most important lessons I've learned over the last few years along with some of the thinking that we

Programming

1. Ajaxlines: Ajax related tutorials, articles and review, in a web 2.0 design.

2. ma.gnolia: Build your web site and build community online

3. Ajaxian: Ajax related blog

4. Web 2.0 Sites: web 2.0 sites directory, for all web 2.0 related services.

While it's no longer quite so fashionable to label your Internet startup a "Web 2.0" company these days, the popularity of the term remains extraordinarily high and is presently used today both far and wide in traditional media and social media.  The Google Trends graph in the figure to the right tells the overall story; global search interest in Web 2.0 is more popular than "social media" and "social networking" combined and by a significant margin.

The Google Trends graph in the figure to the right tells the overall story; global search interest in Web 2.0 is more popular than "social media" and "social network

As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally.

Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.

I thought it might be fun to take a step back and look at some interesting/amazing social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet statistics.  I tried to find stats that are the most up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing this post.

The numbers presented below should be a close representation of today's numbers (please correct me in the comments if you find more recent numbers somewhere and I'll update).

Let's break them down by section: