It’s more or less a fact of life that you learn something new everyday. You might learn that Paris Hilton is dating someone new or that your Grandmother’s application to join the Hells Angels was accepted. However, if you’re employed within the creative fields of graphic design, illustration, web design and developement, the odds are that neither of those things are useful or applicable towards your continued personal growth within your chosen trade. If you’re looking to gain more practical knowledge that will go a long way toward giving you more of an edge in your creative field of employment, you’ll probably find The Learnlist to be a much more valuable source of wisdom on everything from Flash to Dreamweaver. The site is aimed at creative types and lists a bevy of the best books and websites to help you add to your ever growing database of information for innovation. Whether there’s a new program that you need to learn or an application you just haven’t had the time to perfect yet, The Learnlist is the place to go to expand your intelligence on such matters.

The magic of e-mail (aside from instant delivery) is that all of your unwanted spam can be disposed of with the click of a button. If only there was a button to erase the heaps of unwanted paper junk mail that arrives at your front door every day. Wait. Is there one? The geniuses behind Earth Class Mail have come up with a new system for virtualizing your snail mail, so you have a say on whether or not those pesky catalogs wind up wasting space in your house. Their service asks users to forward their mail to one of 18 P.O. boxes, where their envelopes are scanned and posted on a secure website and allows the user to decide whether or not a certain letter is trash or treasure. From there, users can also decide whether they’d prefer to recycle, shred, ship, or open and scan the contents so they can be read online. Not only is Earth Class Mail a seemingly simple solution for eliminating unwanted letters, but it’s also an eco-friendly way to figure out what to do with that inevitable mess of mail.

It always surprises me how long certain industries take to adopt modern technologies that are not only relevant to their business, but can also serve to enhance it. When it comes to the internet and accessibility, the question is never if, but rather when and usually the answer is, the sooner the better. I like to say I am an intermediate wine enthusiast and up until this point have been frustrated at the lack of a single source where I can find a comprehensive list of wines and reviews, rather than just one or the other.

Andy Hund and John Kleven, two young entrepreneurs must have felt my pain too and in January 2006, they set out to remedy this problem; what resulted was Vinquire, which officially launched in April 2007. The site is, first and foremost, a wine search engine, a feat accomplished using a propietary crawler that traverses over 3,500 wine retailers so readers can be sure they get the best prices for their favorite bottle. In addition to an impressive and fast-expanding database, Vinquire’s presentation is equally appealing. The site uses a combination of Django, Javascript, and XHTML/CSS for that Web 2.0 feel. The muted colors are easy on the eyes and even though the speed can use a little help, it’s quite acceptable. My favorite part about the site is how detailed the filtering is: you can search by vendor (Albertsons, BevMo, Costco, Safeway, and my favorite, Trader Joe’s) and then even narrow it down more by price (under $10, under $20, etc).

If that’s not enough, you can add the human aspect into the equation by taking into account reviews. Using a system which they won’t divulge, Vinquire calculates a WineRank score which includes factors such as the average score by users and helpfulness scores of those reviews. I am told that professional reviews will be integrated in the next 3 months, and that’s something I am really looking forward to. I know I should really just make my own decisions when it comes to wine, but with over 550 wine reviews, user forums, a fun wine recommendation feature, and a light-hearted wine industry blog, it doesn’t hurt to get a little help from Vinquire.

Yesterday, Seattle’s internet consulting team SEOmoz announced their Web 2.0 Award winners for the year. During the decsion process, the SEOmoz team took a hard look at hundreds of Web 2.0 sites and picked the crème de la crème in 41 categories. From that point, they chose 25 Web 2.0 experts to vote on the winners. After the experts voted, SEOmoz went even further to interview 15 of the top sites’ creators to give us all a little insight into the details of the creation process for a top Web 2.0 website. I’m definitely adding this list of award winners to my compilation of helpful 2.0 resources. Already, I’m seeing some sites I hadn’t heard of that I want to explore.

If you’re looking for a clean, no-fuss way to post a Flickr-based photo gallery to your website, take Diego Bauducco’s PictoBrowser for a spin. After a quick and painless 2-step process, it generates an html script to embed straight into your code or a blog post, resulting in a super-sexy (and resizable) flash gallery based on either your Flickr sets, tags or groups. Links at the bottom of each of the photos allows quick access back to the original Flickr page, but it’s a stunning way to display your latest photos online without the need for extensive backend coding. You can have a play with the Abandoned Couches group gallery, after the jump.

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If you’re anything like me, you thrive on accumulating massive amounts of information and data. I can tell you how much I spent on gas in March 2005. While sites such as del.icio.us help you aggregate bookmarks, and programs such as EverNote helps you keep clippings and take notes, Plum hopes to do it all. It truly is a one-stop-shop digital scrapbook. Currently in beta, Plum is able to collect websites, bookmarks, images, videos (YouTube & Google Video, and Yahoo! Video currently), email, office documents, etc. The list is growing with each new update to the site. Through the use of browser and desktop tools Plummers, users need only a click to add whatever they may be looking at to a collection. The tools are intelligent enough to comb the document or site for images that you may want to use as a thumbnail. It also generates a list of suggested keywords which you can add to your tag list by clicking. You organize your clipped items via collections which you can rename, delete, or share as you please. It’s fun to be able to explore collections from other people which range from recipes to information about Norway. The tools and site are easy to navigate and straightforward. They scream AJAX and Web 2.0. Check out Plum by either requesting a beta registration or if you’re lucky, a kind soul will extend an invite!

Are you tired of navigating a labyrinth of automated phone systems and the robot voices that accompany them every time you call a company for customer service reasons? Do you find yourself frantically and incessantly pressing ‘0′ to get a human voice on the line, so you can actually get something accomplished? The GetHuman 500 Database is your best friend when it comes to getting a person on the line. It not only provides the customer service phone numbers of 500 of our most frequently called companies, but more importantly, it tells you how to key stroke your way directly to an operator. We have been huge fans of this resource for some time now– it has gotten to the point where Josh will call up a company and will all at once press 0 while simultaneously yelling ‘help,’ ‘operator,’ and ‘domestic’. Amusing to say the least.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been in a taxi-line in any-city USA and just know there must be other people in the line going to the same location as me. Once in a while I take my chances and pipe out ‘anyone going to Williamsburg’– but usually I get a row of blank stares from the line, looking back at me as if they were a group of Russian gypsies, hardly understanding a single word I said. Once in a blue moon I get the cute girl who wants to share a ride, which goes great until I realize she’s on her way to meet her boyfriend, who is, wait for it– naturally a day trader. Still in a NYC Beta, Hitchsters is a site which might not do anything about the day-trading boyfriend, but it does wonders to help people cut travel costs by sharing cabs to and from the airport– check it out on your next trip in or out of New York.

Blogging is the wave of the future–it’s a phenomena that has already sprouted an unprecedented level of world-wide communication–dare I say blogs are making the world smaller? The reader-reach of a blog depends on many factors; there is no easy equation to figure out where our JoshSpear.com readers are located, what they want to read, etc. But people like Steven Johnson are getting creative in the way that they think about blog applications. Today, Steven launched outside.in, a powerful tool for participating in discourse going on in your immediate community. Outside.in operates according to core principles that are centered around the premise that the ‘neighborhood’ is of utmost importance in the world of blogging. When you go to outside.in, you will notice the impressive intelligence of the application when you play around with the map. When you scroll or zoom the map, the always-updated blog content — which comes from a combination of tagged neighborhood data, place blogs, and links contributed by users — changes. Outside.in is a creative and powerful way to transform the wide reach of blogs into a community-focused tool.

Via Boing Boing

Well Threaded is like Monster.com for those looking for jobs with progressive fashion labels. If you want a career with one of these uber-hip companies, go to Well Threaded, set up an account, post your resume, and browse for jobs. You can get in touch with posting employers, or — if you are something really special — they may get a hold of you. I checked out the job postings this morning, and there were definitely some good ones on there–Director of Planning for Trovata, Regional Sales Manager for Hecklewood, Strategic Business Director for New Era Caps–just to name a few. Well Threaded also has a news feed that will keep you up to date on the happenings in the fashion world. While Well Threaded has a lot of room to grow, I really like the idea of a narrowed-down, niched, fashion-focused version of Monster.com and its progeny.

I love design books, I find myself lusting after rare typography books online all the time. There is a new site, called the Design Bookshop, that is making finding the right books easier. They hand picked the most essential and important design books available, with short reviews– they link into Amazon. If you’re looking for a book, but can’t decide what to get– check them out.

Oooh fonts, designs, goodies, I totally love the concept of Freewave. It’s a book and DVD packaged together full of cutting edge design that “allows immediate access to graphic design applications and provides a close study by peeling back the layers of the creative process” What makes Freewave so interesting is that the disc contains the complete makeup of the book including fonts, layouts, photographs and illustrations, as well as pieces of interactive software, animations and sound loops for your own use. It’s completely free to use for commercial and personal use alike. You can check out Fontmonster for more detailed pictures of what’s included, or buy yoursef one on Amazon.

This might be the hottest Deign book of 2005.

Stuff Back is absolutely genius, I don’t know why I haven’t reviewed this yet. I knew something like this existed, but I had no idea it was so easy to setup. StuffBak is a simple loss protection and recovery service for anything you can lose–cell phones, sunglasses, laptops, keys, etc. The facts are pretty huge, ” Asurion, a handheld insurance provider, intentionally lost 50 STUFFBAK-labeled cell phones. 60% found their way home” and Andrew Glassman, in his CNBC investigative report, intentionally lost 6 STUFFBAK-labeled portable items. 5 of the 6 were returned to him within 3 days. Pretty great, I just ordered a starter set so I can protect all my mobile electronics!

Remember how to I told you I loved fonts?–What would be better than an entire blog dedicated to free fonts? Welcome to blog land Font Leech, I wish you well. They’re new, so give ‘em a break, but slowly I think they build a great resource for all the font lover-designers in the universe if they keep it up!

I love fonts. I want to profess my love for fonts with sheer collection, I might be a novice collector but I have got nearly 3500 or so and I can’t seem to get enough. It’s like dumpster diving–no no no it’s font diving. This could be a hobby, I’m a typography nut. With that said, Typographica has posted their favorite fonts of 2004. Some great stuff–and Typeco also has some wonderful designs. Expect more font posts in the future, I’m coming out with it publicly, and design wouldn’t be complete with out it. I love fonts.