Newsweek's got a cover story that takes Bay area joy around Web 2.0 and social media tools and turns it into a national web kiss, conplete with some of the best and the brightest beaming from cute photos. Stuart Butterfield, Caterina Fake and Flickr make the cover of Newsweek via got a story that begins, The New Wisdom of the Web: Why is everyone so happy in Silicon Valley again? A new wave of start-ups are cashing in on the next stage of the Internet. And this time, it's all about ... you.

One ofd my favorite quotes in the story is from Caterina Fake, who says: ""We were very small and very poor," says Fake, "so we built a lot of features that were deliberately viral." A big boost came from bloggers, who appreciated that Flickr had a one-button command to "blog this," and a photo would instantly appear on their site, hot-linked to the shot's real home on Flickr. They also made sure that their site worked well with other Living Web applications ? Flickr photos are one of the prime ingredients in Web mash-ups."

As Paid Content says: "All the usual suspects get mentions -- MySpace, del.icio.us, Craigslist, Facebook, YouTube -- and some would-bes -- Imeem, even Mary Hodder's stealthy video-sharing Dabble."

The story is worth a read--it's very well done and right on target if you want to know what kinds of things us tech heads inside the Bubble salivate over----but I wonder what people outslide the bell jar will think about the bright, shiny joy Brad Stone describes.

More on this from Doc, Paul Kedrosky, and others.