Via John Battelle and a few intermediary steps I landed on Jon Udell’s screencast about the evolution of the history of the heavy metal umlaut. Worth viewing for several reasons:

1. What’s a screencast? Something I’m sure you’ve seen before — a narrated slideshow of screen captures. What’s new about this is that calling it a screencast highlights its mode as a presentation medium, and Jon demonstrates here that it’s an excellent way of documenting some topics. I also recommend his article on del.icio.us. (Note: both screencasts contain audio that begin playing immediately.
2. If you’ve never quite grokked how collaborative editing at Wikipedia works, Jon walks you through several trendlines in the umlaut article. Especially interesting is the note that vandalism attacks are corrected within minutes.
3. Finally, the article itself covers varied ground as it tracks the various approaches that people bring to it. Did you know there’s an umlaut-N in a Guatemalan language? Ever given much thought to how people would collectively display such a letter on a web page? And is there anything Hitleresque about using Gothic lettering in the name of a metal band?