ReadWriteWeb

After selling VirtualTourist to Expedia, J.R. Johnson launched Lunch to encourage intelligent content and critical dialogue. Today, in expanding his mission for meaningful engagement, Johnson is launching Twitter Lists. This new service asks users to rationalize their Twitter recommendations. While services like Twubble, Mr. Tweet, Chirpio and even Twitter itself offer suggested accounts, Lunch is the only site that also requires a good explanation.

Giftag may not be a revolutionary product, but it is kind of nifty. The product was created by Best Buy (BBY), a retailer that didn't have an online registry service. Instead of creating one, though, they decided to create Giftag instead: a browser plugin that lets you make online wishlists and share them with your friends. The technology will be integrated into Best Buy's web site in the coming months.

For a lot of college students, the new semester is just around the corner. Last year, we created a long list of great Web 2.0 tools that we thought would be helpful for college students.

But given how fast things develop on the web, we thought we would revisit this topic again this year and look at some of the most useful Web 2.0 tools that have the potential to help students do better in school, collaborate with their fellow students, and save them time.

The iPhone's memory might be too small to carry your complete music collection with you, but thanks to a growing number of streaming music apps, you don't have to rely on your local storage anymore to have an ample supply of new music to listen to.

And thanks to a new application from Simplify Media, you can now even access all that music from your desktop while on the road.

Screencasts, how-to videos that show only what's happening on the computer screen, have been around since as early as 1994, according to Wikipedia. But in recent years, their popularity as an instructional method has grown and screencasts have become an essential means of teaching on the web (the term "screencast" was actually coined in 2004). Below are some of our favorite places to learn by watching on the web.

Earlier today we mentioned a plugin for AIM that would translate what you type on the fly into another language. That's an exceptionally useful tool, but the far more fluid and accurate way to speak to people in another language, is to actually learn the language. Thankfully, there are a wide variety of ways to learn languages online, many of them available for free. Below is a list of more than 20 ways you can go from knowing how to say "Hello" to fluency.