Everyone get ready to party it up like it's six months after the 2.6 release! GNOME 2.8 Desktop & Developer Platform has been unleased to the wild. Mostly evolutionary changes are in this release, better handling of mime types and associating files with programs, speed and usability improvements, rendezvous support, auto-mounting/playing of USB memory sticks/CDs etc through HAL and DBUS, nicer applets, evolution/calendar integration..... and a whole wack of new stuff.
Here's the message to the GNOME announce list.