Microsoft is the last company in the world to finally deliver a working, reliable and free anti-spyware solution for their own OS, Windows XP. Better late than never, it works remarkably well, and for most home and small business users, is a must-download new program.

Sites like Digg.com, which let users choose the most popular news stories, have exploded onto the scene amidst a mass of Web 2.0 and social media hysteria. With nearly 350 Digg-style sites on just about any news topic you can imagine, including sites in other languages, the user-ranked and user-generated content revolution won’t be going away any time soon.

After several beta and release candidate versions, the final version of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) has been released and is now available for download, although the first bug has already been reported.

While many parts of the world, including Australia, won’t be seeing a PS3 in stores until March 2007, the US and Japanese launch is still set for November and final preparations are well underway, while the Wii’s online service, which is launching worldwide in November and December with the Wii itself, is also being finalised. While new online services for the Wii and PS3 show great potential, what is some of the history, and where are they going?

Just to see what would come up, I typed in ‘cool web 2.0 sites’ into Google. One of the results took me here, to a San Francisco Chronicle newspaper article on this very topic, with my search term as the name of the article!

Bubblesnaps is a fun site that allows you to add thought or speech balloons to your photos, which you can then email to your friends, or post on your blog or social networking profile.

The world’s most popular Internet phone call software, Skype, have released a new beta 2.0 version for Mac users which finally supports video!

Browster is a nifty new browsing tool that allows you to preview links before you actually click on them. 

Ever heard of Writely? They created a web based and free wordprocessor a little while back, and then bam - they were bought by Google, and they closed the beta program.