It’s Friday already, here’s some news to note from the past week or so.

Silicon Florist marks its first month – The best new blog around, if you live in the Portland area and are interested in web/tech, this is a must read. I left a comment about how reading Silicon Florist reminds me of the early days of TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, and Mashable when I was always anticipating the next post to see what great new stuff was coming. I’ve become a bit jaded following the general web 2.0 blogs lately, with their growing need to be businesses and post constantly, and I rarely get excited about anything that is posted there anymore, nor can I ever hope to keep up. So having a locally focused blog makes me feel so much more connected again.

Marshall leaves SplashCast to join Read/Write Web – Speaking of Read/Write Web, Portland’s most famous web guy makes the jump to one of the top Web 2.0 blogs. I love this move. Marshall’s one of the top minds on web analysis and news and it’ll be great to have him back covering the whole web again. BTW, as part of his consulting practice, he’s now offering a social media starter kit which will be great for anybody interested in learning how to corral the vast information on the web. Also, if you’re already fully up to speed on finding news and feeds, but you find too much of it, check out his post on how to read feeds more efficiently and avoid information overload.

CLIQ beta announced – Portland’s StepChange group launches a beta program for CLIQ, a new blog community widget that lets you share content from your “clique” of bloggers. If you’re interested in widgets, either developing or the bursting economy around them, Kevin from StepChange will be speaking at the October Web Innovators meeting. Also, as you can see on my site here, I’ve added a CLIQ widget that features Portland Web/Tech bloggers. If you’re interested in joining, sign up for the beta, or let me know and I’ll send you an invite to the Clique.

Portland Web Innovators on OpenID – Adam put together a great topic and place and the turnout was fantastic. OpenID has many challenges ahead to reach mass adoption, but its great to see people tackling this important area. Special thanks to Jive Software for hosting. I haven’t been as active this year in the Web Innovators but am thrilled to see it thriving now.

Advanced Operators posts its 4th topic – AdvOp is a great new community that brings bloggers/technologists (lots of Portland ones) together every week to focus on a single topic in the form of blog posts and comments. Like Silicon Florist, its another great way to get connected to those around you, and that share your interests. I haven’t participated yet, but hope to one of these weeks, and I enjoy following the threads.