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Andy Baio is a man who gets things done, though his accomplishments are often quite unusual. Now he's taking that attitude straight to the nation's capital.

In 2008, Baio posted online, and refused to take down, the grainy video tape of Sarah Palin's participation in the 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant. He's received cease and desist letters from lawyers representing Disney, the Beatles and Bill Cosby. He made millions co-founding the early social calendaring website Upcoming.org and selling it to Yahoo. He interviewed the mysterious Italian factory worker whose video shattered all YouTube records without explanation, before its author deleted it. He commissioned an 8-bit cover of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue on the 50th anniversary of the album's release (Kind of Bloop). What else was left for Baio to do? Go to Washington, of course.

At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

The delays and uncertainty in submitting an iPhone app to Apple for consideration is inspiring some developers to skip the process all-together and release mobile apps that leverage increasingly powerful mobile browsers.

The latest mobile web apps that have knocked our socks off are from a startup of ex-Googlers called NextStop and the Yahoo-owned events calendar Upcoming. Both offer new mobile iPhone apps that can be updated seamlessly, are available immediately and are a lot of fun to use. Could mobile web apps challenge the dominance of native apps on the iPhone? That's an active debate.

After Andy Baio co-founded and sold social events listing site Upcoming.org to Yahoo! he could have spent the rest of his days doing whatever he wanted. He spent a year and a half writing, but this month he decided to join another startup (Kickstarter.com), because he loves building social software.

Baio is a thinker, a hacker of big social patterns and an admirer of the collective intelligence that emerges from groups of people acting independently on the web. We sat down with him this week and discussed some of his ideas about what makes good social software grow.

A friend recently held a garage sale to purge all of his worldly possessions. At 8:58am before the final tables were out, men and women circled the block like buzzards over a fresh kill. The first group included punky-looking eBay dealers, antique collectors and audiophiles looking for rare dance hall vinyls. The second wave consisted of board game enthusiasts, recycled clothing designers, preschool teachers and espresso-touting Shabby Chic home decorators. And finally, at about 2pm, the geeks and bike-enthusiasts came to claim the last Playstation games, computer parts, brake levers and tubes.

Garage sales are no longer just for blue-haired grandmothers with teacup fetishes. While eBay and Etsy are great for selling rare or specialty items, setting up an auction or store for your mismatched cutlery might not get you the results you need. One blessing in this down economy is that we're learning to reclaim and recycle in a way that our grandmothers have been doing for years. Whether you like haggling over weird items on a Sunday or you'd simply like to list your own sale, here are some great resources.

Analyst firm Gartner has just released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.