Content creation for the poor man
A newly launched website, with which I'm in no way affiliated with (it wouldn't correspond to the laws in Germany, *cough*), has an interesting approach to "create" content. Users constantly deliver new images and web links that are always up to date and show what's hot in the web at the very moment - probably faster than any other fun site, forum or blog.
The website I'm talking about is Pr0gramm.com (probably NSFW at any time of the day!). It's actually not only a website, but also an IRC-bot, that idles in different channels on the chat network Quakenet. This bot catches all URLs written in these chat channels. If an image URL is posted, the image is downloaded by the bot and displayed with a thumbnail on the website in a matter seconds.
There's no extra work for anyone - the website constantly gathers new content and the chatters benefit by having an archive of everything posted in their channels for free. I won't say it's Web 3.0, but as users don't generate content knowingly, I guess it's not exactly Web 2.0 either.
Pr0gramm.com also has another cool feature, which probably has come to your attention already: Image thumbnails are generated in different sizes, corresponding to their importance (the rating), and are then sorted into a big grid. There's some PHP and Javascript going on, to calculate size and position of these images. For matters I won't discuss here, *cough*, I'm quite familiar with the inner workings of all this. So I'll write another article about this technology as soon as I find some more time.