I’m not dead, I promise. Things are very busy in my system right now, most especially in my department. Hopefully in less than a month I’ll have something to show you all and I can post more regularly. But for now, just something little.

When trying to visualize the sheer scope of the Web 2.0 beast it’s a bit hard to wrap your head around in simply because of the very wide amount of services that these sorts of applications provide. From Wikipedia, to The Best Stuff in the World, to Flickr. And with the amount of startups you hear about constantly coming and going it’s little surprise that people are often overwhelmed.

In the Web 2.0 class that I co-teach we often use Go2Web2.0 and Web2Logo to let the class participants see the different types of sites that are out there and to help them explore a bit more if they wish to do so. These are both good, but at times it’s hard to navigate around them if you’re already overwhelmed by the choices that are out there. However, there is a newish site out there called Simple Spark which, according to Download Squad, is looking to be for web apps what Google is for everything else. At over 3,000, we can see where this is going.

On first glance, it’s laid out really well with multiple catagories that open up which give you specific sections to choose so you can get right to the meat. Picking almost any provides an extensive list of Web 2.0 type applications that provide that sort of service. It does make it easy to find the type of app you’re looking for. The social network heading is one of the more interesting to look at and seeing the many many ways that people are connecting these days.

So, what is the real size of the web 2.0 beast? I’m not sure anyone will really know and even with indexing sites it’s almost impossible to keep up with the new ones springing up almost everyday. It will be interesting to see how the development of applications like these grows and changes and more and more people embrace Web 2.0 and technology like it.