Awesome new stuff from my mate Albert Lai at Bubbleshare.

Somehow, Mr. 24/7 manages to bounce around the world, having meetings with countless VCs, content companies, big carriers and other potential business partners, yet still has time to respond to email faster than just about anyone I know AND squeeze in lunch with Bill Gates AND ship a boatload of new features.

The latest release of Bubbleshare, out now, has added:

* BubbleCaptions - so you can add speech balloons to shots of your goofy friends.

* The Desktop BubbleBar (in alpha): streams photos to your desktop in real time in addition to the synched online/offline access.

* Improved Community Stuff: (With voting and User Profile Pages)

* AJAXified Slideshow Transitions

* Mobile Access: so you can post to BS directly from your cell phone!

Check out this hilarious photoset for yourself, to get a taste of all the stuff Albert and his team have been cranking out.

Even better, Albert's blowing the thing wide open. They've published an API, everything is RSS enabled, they're supporting Apple iPod PhotoCasts, and let you pull down a whole album worth of photos in one big Zip file.

Full disclosure: I work with Albert from time to time in an advisory capacity. Obviously, I do this because I'm really impressed with what he's doing and think his entire team deserves to become fabulously successful and wealthy. I receive no compensation for my work with Bubbleshare - just good karma.

So yes, I'm biased - but you've got to admit this stuff rocks.

This is just a rolling clipboard of my source links for the Web 2.oh panel at iSummit 2006 on Friday morning.

Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0".

Tim's "compact definition" - the architecture of participation.

Paul Boutin's Slate piece "Just call it the Internet"

Jeffrey Zeldman "Web 3.0"

The NYTimes on "Silicon Valley 2.0"

Newsweek: "The New Wisdom of the Web"

Michael Arrington's TechCrunch

TechCrunch: "Web 2.0 companies I couldn't live without"

The sort of canonical Web 2.0 applications list (not)

Don Marti: "On Web 2.0, application uses you"

The Official Web 2.0 validator

The Panellists:

James Walker's Bryght

Salim Ismail's PubSub

Albert Lai's BubbleShare

Brent Ashley AshleyIT

Pete Mosley PM&A

And here's some of the other sites and services mentioned during the session - I tried to jot down as many of these as I could catch, but we covered a lot of territory - drop me a note in the comments with any ones I've missed:

The Dell Hell Story from Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine

Scobleizer - Robert Scoble of Microsoft's blog

Second Life

Flickr

Writely

Ajaxwrite

Ajaxian

And someone in the audience called out "Innocentive" or "Innosentive" or something like that. Is it this site or perhaps this ? Not sure...

And, of course, The Cluetrain.

Did Edelman's lawyers pull the plug? I'm trying to get into Strumpette's entertaining new flack-attacking blog, but the site seems b0rked.

A temporary hiccup, I hope.

I'm parked at the first day of the iSummit conference here at the amazing new MaRS facility in downtown Toronto. In fact, I'm sitting on the floor, up against the back wall in a main auditorium packed to overflowing. This place is mobbed.

I can't even see the giant projection screen for the opening keynote's slides, but it doesn't really matter - the speaker is easily engaging enough not to need any kind of Powerpoint support. Alexander Manu, Director, Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity at the Ontario College of Art & Design is holding forth on imagination, the power of play, the interfaces of the future, and all kinds of wonderful stuff.

He's a terrific, entertaining, whip-smart presenter. Even with my butt parked on the industrial grey carpet at the back of the crowd, he's still having an impact.

Wifi in the room is painfully patchy, alas. I'm going to have to go out into the atrium to find a signal and post this. More reports as and when I can...

Enormous piles of email, vmail, real mail and just general stuff to get caught up on. We have somewhere around 600 photos to post, and a LOT to blog.

For now, here's a first quick taste of the epic road trip, hastily thrown into Bubbleshare:

Over 4,600 KM on the road, through 13 states and innumerable cups of the worst motel and gas station coffee ever inflicted on unsuspecting tourists...

All worth it. Seven days of absolute magic at DisneyWorld, seen through the eyes of three completely awed and very, very happy kids.

Proper update soon. Spent most of today sorting email (1,500+ new messages in 3 different email accounts) and getting caught up with voicemail, bills, news, etc. Photos and trip report to follow.

Much lighter blogging ahead for the next week and a bit.

We're just heading out the door for the great family road trip of 2006. Driving from Toronto to DisneyWorld.

It's 1,400 miles to Orlando, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cheerios, a portable DVD player, it's dark and we're wearing sensible shoes. Hit it!

See you on the road...

From the Orlando Sentinel:

"logging expert to speak to public relations, ad groups"

Excellent. Apparently Josh Hallett is going to be speaking at the joint meeting of the Dick Pope/Polk County chapter of the Florida Public Relations Association and the Imperial Polk Advertising Federation.

I'm sure he'll help them see the forest for the blogs...

Well, perhaps parochialism isn't precisely the right word - but it's somefing like that.

Was just Gtalk IMing with my dear, wonderful cousin Michael Quinn (the other Canadian transplant in the clan - although he's set up shop way the heck over there in the lovely Laurentian Mountains, a long way from the concrete and glass of Hogtown).

Michael pointed out something strange in Gmail. If you have your default display language set to English (UK) you're missing out on a shed load of new features that have pumped into the beta in recent months. The ability to define Groups in your contact list, for example, or change the "From" address for outbound emails, or use the "Vacation Responder" (Gmail's version of the Out of Office Assistant) - these and a bundle of other extra goodies have been sneaked into the app in classic Google style, with little or no fanfare over the last however many weeks.

But the only way to access these fine features is if Google thinks you're in the US. Punters in other parts of the world clearly aren't ready for such splendid extra widgetry.

Easy fix for this, of course. Just pull up your Google account Settings from the top of Gmail, switch the default display language to "English (US)", save settings, then pop back into the app.

Woo hoo! There's all the new goodies, just waiting for you to fiddle with.

Odd.