What's cool is a question that has as many answers as there are people.

Blink by Malcolm Gadwell / Gladwell maintains that we "blink" when we think without thinking. We do that by "thin-slicing," using limited information to come to our conclusion. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds that experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than we do with volumes of analysis.

Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb / A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world.

Like Pop!Tech below, TED is conference of visionary thinkers, whose presentations have been filmed and posted to the web. Poke around and find something delightful.

Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired and Whole Earth Review has a collection of web pages called Cool tools full of gear, gadets and approaches that ate more of my time than I care to admit. A related site is Street Use which includes backyard pulse jets and match box cameras. He also wrote the acclaimed Out of Control, a book about technology, biology, decentralization and self-sustaining systems. (It was also required reading for some of the cast of the Matrix movies.)

Make is a magazine and blog that channels and expresses the desire to make things. Newsweek called Make "geek DIY (do it yourself) porn". There is a store where you can buy things from derby racing kits to DIY motherboards for video games. I recommend the rentable library of instructional videos (from machine lathe operation to painting water colors). There is an annual event called the Maker Faire (which included silliness like a lifesize version of the Mousetrap game using bowling balls instead of marbles and massive fire-breathing robots)

I just stumbled upon the Second Life Cable Network. There is lots of programming, almost too much to see. But there is a great area with videos from the Second Life Best Practices in Education 2007 conference. Chris Collins (Fleep Tuque) from the U. Cincinnati provides an excellent overview of what higher ed institutions are doing with their own islands.

Digg is a social network that relies on its users to collectively determine what has value on the Web. There are no editors at digg; all stories are submitted and voted on by its users. Categories include: World & Business, Technology, and Science. As a user, I can follow others in order to find like-minded individuals, increasing the likelihood that I will find content that is interesting to me.

Pop!Tech is a yearly conference in Camden, Maine where several hundred visionary thinkers come together in an ongoing conversation about science and technology and their implications for the future. All Pop!Tech sessions are available to watch free of charge as Pop!Casts. Pop!Casts are Creative Commons licensed high-definition videos and MP3 audio files.

iGoogle allows users to easily create a personalized homepage. Chose a page design, and then select "gadgets" to add to your site. Gadgets can include weather reports, a feed with your latest email messages, RSS feeds for popular news sites, games and puzzles, calendars and calculators...if you can think of it, there's probably a gadget for it. And if there isn't, Google now allows you to create your own gadgets to use on your website and share with your friends.

WomenGamers.Com is a social website that focuses on gaming. The website features gaming news, articles, reviews, downloads, and an active discussion forum. Despite its name, members of the community are not required to be female, though the site does tend to favor more of the female perspective on gaming.

A new peer-reviewed journal titled Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on the Internet features articles investigating the nature of digital interaction. If you're interested in any sort of technology-driven communication and interaction -- from the influences of text messaging on adolescents to the social aspects of virtual worlds and online communities -- you may want to take a look at this journal.