I am currently a small-time investor, and I spend much of my spare time working on computational and analytical methods to aid investing. My M.S. thesis was an attempt to automatically trade that didn't do so well, but I have improved the results since then.
IndyMac just collapsed from a real, old-style, "run on the bank." Is your bank safe?
Fundamental analysis is the analysis of the fundamentals of the company underlying the company itself in order to determine what will happen to the stock. This is good for longer-term investing, since eventually the market price for a share will correspond with its actual value, even if it might not happen anytime soon. I don't believe in "buy-and-hold" as a strategy, but I do take most of what fundamental analysis has to say to be very useful, mostly as a starting point.
Technical Analysis assumes that important information can be gathered from the price chart of any traded entity. I rely almost entirely on technical analysis now. 99% of technical analysis is crap: the other 1% is awesome.
I am working on a new collabrative stock website called BullzBearz.com. There isn't much usable as of yet, but I hope that I'll be ready for some beta testers by the end of the year. Feel free to e-mail me at chris-gore@earthlink.net and I'll set you up with an account whenever I am ready.
I play around with a fake account on UpDown.com sometimes, in addition to my real brokerage account and IRA. You start out with $1,000,000 in fake money and go from there. It can be fun; check it out.