This week, we’re going to start with a few blogs that we hadn’t heard of a week ago, but recently discovered and found kind of interesting. Hint: linking to us and/or using the term “wikinomics” somewhere on your site makes discovery a lot more likely :

Monica Hamburg has written an intersting 4-part series on Crowdsourcing. Her concluding thoughts went up on March 19th, while parts 1, 2, and 3 can be found here, here, and here. I personally find post 2 – You afraid of the crowds? – the most interesting of all. Be warned – if you click through on all the links she provides you could be reading all day.

Joe Wikert has an interesting blog focused on the future of publishing. Sure, the recent post highlighting the Wikinomics playbook might have drawn me in the first place, but from the interviews with Philip Davis and Navanti Arakeri (co-founder of Fractal Press, an interesting little company with wikinomics written all over it), to the thoughts about Borders moving further from the Long Tail and Wiki contributor compensation challenges (among many other interesting posts and interviews)… it’s a site well worth poking around. And he has great taste in playbooks.

I’ve been meaning to mention this site for awhile – you know all the talk about changing the education system? Check out this class on Networking, Knowledge and the Digital Age. I think Wikinomics was on the curriculum… the comments/questions tied to the book are quite interesting.

In the Long Tail, Chris Anderson talked about Birdmonster, a DIY band self-releasing their own album. A lot of reasons were given for why they were avoiding the labels, which fit right in with Long Tail (and wikinomics) thinking. Interestingly, the band has now signed with a label. Read here to see why.

The Buzz Bin is always full of interesting posts. I really enjoyed this little interview with Doug Haslam – who recently discovered the Technorati rating of his Twitter stream is ahead of his blog – as well as the “Getting Real” post on the top benefits of engaging social media.

Shelly Palmer’s post on Antigua’s Copyright threat “and the virtualization of value” is quite good. The threat is to copy virtually anything that can be duplicated… and in this day and age that is quite a lot.

The Freakonomics blog pointed me towards this article that might make a few people think: is your Doctor blogging about you? 

Finally, you must have seen it somewhere by now, but just in case: the YouTube 2007 video awards. Please, I say PLEASE  LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!