37 Signals offers some great holiday ecommerce tips to make your online retail site just that much more successful this holiday season. Peak buying season is just around the corner. Better read up!

Ever feel like you blinked and you missed some hugely important new trend online? I admit it; sometimes I feel that way. I take a break from my RSS aggregator for a day and I feel totally out of the loop. But I usually catch up pretty quickly.

For those of you who don't live and die by your RSS aggregator (i.e. you have a life outside of your computer), there's some exciting stuff happening:

• Flock is reinventing the web browser
• 37 Signals' Writeboard is reinventing collaborative authoring
• Rollyo and Eurekster's Swicki are reinventing vertical search
• Memeorandum is reinventing how we consume tech news and spot trends
• Ning is reinventing the way we build complex, socially networked web applications

I love it when disruptive technologies leave "old school" companies wondering "Wha' happen'd?". One behemoth that won't be left in the dust, though, is Yahoo. Despite Yahoo's size, they are poised to cash in big-time to the transition of the Web from passive browsing to a platform for collaboration and social networking (in other words, Web 2.0). Yahoo!'s made some really smart Web 2.0-ish purchases lately, including Flickr and Upcoming.org. Not to be outdone there's also Ebay who just bought Skype and AOL who just bought Weblogs, Inc.

37 Signals' redesign of Fedex's convoluted "Ship Manager" is a testament to their brilliance in user interface design. But the real kicker is: they're doing it for free, just to show off their intellectual wares and to stimulate dialogue. Fedex would be mugs not to take this advice on board.