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I'd give del.icio.us a try. It uses labels instead of folders, which are much more useful, and there's a Firefox plugin (and also an IE one, IIRC).

the Semantic Web is a publishing medium; the creation of content is left to the will of the publishers (ideally the creation of metadata should be computer-assisted, but there are other possibilities). Your "second problem" is precisely what the S.W. is intended to solve; it doesn't require people to agree in the data format, everybody can define their own.

everyone is going to have to include the metadata necessary to integrate their data into the Semantic Web. How's that going to work? Who's going to make it work?

It's already happening...check out sites like flickr (photo blogging) and del.icio.us (collaborative bookmarks).

I always love BG Micro's weird catalog. Don't let the yellow background throw you, it's a mimic of the colored paper they print the dead-tree version on. It's significantly less annoying in that form. Don't count on them for production quantities unless they say so, but some of the small lots of surplus stuff are super cool.

American Science and Surplus, formerly known as Jerryco carries a broader spectrum of stuff, including plastic replicas of human organs, glow-in-the-dark everything, millitary surplus and yes, a variety of electrical and electronic weirdness. If the Edmund Scientific catalog is too highbrow for you, Jerryco is sure to amuse.

There are some hardware hackers over at Green Bay Professional Packet Radio whose projects you might enjoy.

I'm also going to suggest del.icio.us as a good way to collectively manage bookmarks like these. Just go play with it.

del.icio.us is a pretty cool replacement/complement to bookmarks as it allows you to share and categorize interesting links and also gives you an rss feed in return. Along with that, there's a slight soical networking aspect.