Following Tarek's lead:
I'm really tempted to go along with Tarek and pick PyZMQ, since 0MQ has been a pretty major mind expander for me this year, but I honestly haven't used anything from it besides the basic 0MQ bindings. Instead, I'll pick IPython Notebook, which I've really only just begun playing with (after the PyData NYC conference), but is looking pretty exciting. I'm seriously impressed at how much potential is packed into something so simple. Salt really needs mentioning too. Very simple and powerful.
Yeah, I really suck at picking only one thing to highlight.
I guess the biggest newish "technique" (rather than a language, library, or framework) for me in Python-land would be Behavior Driven Development. BDD with Lettuce was a big factor in the development of a major project at work. I'm hoping to streamline our Django/Lettuce/Selenium setup to make it easier for more of our projects to move in that direction.
Well, my biggest project lately, that I'm very proud of is a distributed image and thumbnail server called Reticulum that is written in Go, not Python. I did develop a prototype in Python/Django first before I settled on Go for the main implementation.
I really have no idea. I have hundreds of blogs and aggregators in my RSS reader so it all just comes at me in one big firehose of information. By the time I've read and digested it, I've lost track of where it came in from.
I've got a big project at work starting up that is going to involve writing a ton of Netlogo. Don't get me wrong, Netlogo is a neat little platform and is very good for what it does and what we're using it for. But I would kill for a platform with the same capabilities for agent-based modelling that let me code in Python instead. Actually, years ago, I built a simulation framework in Python for our engineering department that came pretty close to being what I am imagining, but funding on that dried up, our priorities shifted, and it never quite made it out into the world. Maybe I'll revive it in a modernized form. Now I'm thinking about something architected like IPython Notebook (or built off it) with a Python engine and a web/websockets frontend that can make use of nice D3.js and SVG visualization.