Staying On-Top of Programming Trends?

GhettoPeanut asks: "Trends are constantly changing, upgrading, or become popular due to high end user demand or just basic usefulness. I do my best to keep up with the trends, believing that for the most part they will be better then the current methods in place, or just comfort in knowing that if enough people use it, that there will be allot of help out there. Ultimately though, its keeping up with these trends and trying to figure out what's a fad versus what's actually useful that's the difficult part. What do some of you do to keep up with the trends? Websites? Magazines such as Dr. Dobbs? Forums? I know there's not one solve all, but for the sake of argument, suppose you wanted to stay on the forefront of Java based web development, what would you do?"