Hulu Plus is a subscription service (currently $7.99 / month) providing access to Hulu programming on a variety of decives.

The Good

• Solid performance across several devices, in our case the iPad, iPhone, and Netflix Roku Box, which features a Hulu Channel displaying Hulu Plus content. As with the Hulu website, all feature user-friendly navigation. I also encountered no technical issues during streaming.

The Bad

• Content confusion: Hulu Plus contains a subset of the “Hulu Free” content available on your computer. For example, “Hulu Free” features several Food Network programs which aren’t available on Hulu Plus. Trying to access this programming on an iPhone or iPad results in a “web only” warning. Meanwhile, the entire Netflix Watch Instantly catalog is available regardless of your chosen device using, and iTunes purchases / rentals are playable on any computer or Apple device including the Apple TV.
• Content retains advertising despite the monthly fee.
• As a result of the content limitations, there are only a handful of shows I’m interested in, and an iTunes season pass or episode rentals becomes price-competitive.

Conclusion

Hulu Plus looks and works great, but the content limitation calls for personal evaluation before subscribing - take inventory of the available programming and see if it’s worth $7.99 a month. In my case, well, I just cancelled our subscription.

The Good

• Awesomely light; could fit the Air, iPad, and all assorted cable nonsense in one backpack with room for more (shameless plug: check out Waterfield Designs laptop sleeve cases). I’d estimate the weight of both hardware equal to the aged MacBook.
• The technically pokey processor speed feels less so due to the SSD drive.
• Removed features which in retrospect, were hardly used: battery charge indicator light, optical drive, FireWire port.
• No optical drive: rarely used on the old MacBook. The Remote Disc feature works fine — it treats a DVD drive of another computer on the same network as if it were attached to the Air. I easily installed iWork using the Remote Disc feature.
• Brightness controls fade rather than jump in discrete steps — a tad easier on the eyes.
• Instant on and wake from sleep is surprisingly snappy — I’ll soon become impatient with our Mac Minis. Getting back to work is comparable to iPad or iPhone, and battery life is maintained while in sleep mode.
• Dead quiet due to the solid state drive and rarely-activate fans.
• Runs much cooler than the aged MacBook.
• Super thin and light, yet feels sturdier to the aluminum and tight hinge. Also seems easier to clean, particularly in comparison to those annoying plastic stains.
• The glass one-button trackpad is steadily growing on me. Really like the multitouch options like three-finger swipe to go back / forward a web page, and four-finger swipe down for Expose.
• Typing on the Air in one’s lap feels like pressing on a surface no thicker than a clipboard.

The Bad

• Flash isn’t pre-installed, likely to preserve battery life — just watching a few Flash videos on Hulu clearly has an effect. My current solution is ClickToFlash, a Safari browser extension which blocks all Flash content until you click the blocked area, effectively acting as both ad-blocker and battery preserver.
• Neither RAM, hard drive, or battery is user replaceable. This forced me to purchase 4GB RAM preinstalled — slightly annoying since I’m used to purchasing RAM after the fact and self-installing to save a few clams. A drive or battery failure will require a trip to the Apple Store.
• No backlit keyboard — MacBook Pros of similar price have this feature.
• With the MacBook Air resting in one hand, you can inadvertently pinch your palm in the hinge while opening the lid.

Conclusion

Without hesitation, this is the first MacBook portable I’ve owned that truly feels, well, portable. It’s light enough to feel nearly inconsequential, can easily be held in one hand, feels like typing on nearly nothing, yet has enough power to do pretty much anything I most commonly ask of a Mac.

My first MacBook was a graphite “toilet seat” iBook followed by the first Intel model MacBook. In retrospect, the iBook’s case was large enough to be slightly embarrassing in public, the “hockey puck” power adapter prone to shorts and failure, and the hinge eventually shorted out its backlight. The MacBook was an improvement in many ways, but still felt heavier than ideal, was just slow enough to mean hot thighs / noisily blasting fans, and its case plastic eventually became stained and cracked.

I don’t know how the Air’s case will hold up over the years, but after a mere week it’s impressive how far Apple’s portable line has come — exponentially more power and function and solidity in a much smaller and lighter package.

So far this already the best portable Mac I’ve owned, and may become my favorite Mac ever — pushing aside my pet favorite, that purple iMac. Which still came with one of the worst pieces of Mac hardware ever — the infamous puck mouse.

At this juncture, I can’t name a single major issue with the Air. It’s a few hairs shy of the elusive “perfect” Mac.

Gazelle buys old electronics. I recently sold my defunct iPhone 3G sporting case cracks, scratched glass, and cat bites, rendering it unlikely to be sold through the usual venues (Craigsist, eBay).

The Good

• Easy to understand site: Search for what you want to sell, then fill out a concise form describing approximate condition for pricing. You’ll also see a chart displaying the steadily dropping price of your gear over time. Once you agree to sell, Gazelle sends you a box, you ship your item to them, they check the goods out, and you get paid.
• No postage: Gazelle sends a box with pre-paid postage for you to ship your goods to them. Note: you must provide your own packing materials — I used some leftover bubble wrap.
• In addition to electronics, they buy DVDs, video games, cameras, computers, calculators, home audio equipment, etc.
• Even if your stuff is worth nothing, Gazelle recycles.

The Bad

• Time delay: waited nearly two weeks for the box to arrive, plus a week and a half to get the check, nearly a month in total. Not for those in need of fast cash.
• Really old stuff isn’t worth much: Several year old iPod = $0. My MacBook = $40. Old Apple TV = $40.

Conclusion

Except for the time delay, the experience was no-hassle and straightforward. One might get a better price through other channels, but Gazelle is a sure thing, vs. an eBay auction or haggling over price with a random buyer. It may be worth your time to see what price your obsolete tech detritus and early adopter mistakes are worth there.

Picked up a 16GB WiFi iPad, the basics should be known to everyone on the planet by now, so without further ado, here’s my take:

The Good

• Beautiful screen: highly detailed, bright, crisp, and viewable from almost every angle. Great for sharing content with others. It’s large enough to be immersive, but not too big to affect portability. The larger size is very welcome for iPad-specific apps, and after some use, returning to the relatively tiny iPhone screen and keyboard feels like taking off a pair of glasses and fiddling with a Tinkertoy. I still love my iPhone, but whenever home, will be picking up the iPad.
• Feels blazingly fast compared to my now long-in-the-tooth 3G iPhone.
• The included Apple apps are gorgeous, taking full advantage of the larger screen size, and sport a smile-inducing attention to detail: the Notes app looks like a yellow note pad with torn paper at top, placed in a black leather folio, while Contacts and Calendar resemble actual book-like desk items with stitching between pages at the spine.
• 16GB will be enough space for my purposes. Apps are relatively small, since I have already loaded 11 screens worth (220 apps) which takes up about 5 gigs, leaving enough room for a decent subset of music, videos, and books.
• The iTunes, App Store, and iBook Store, are beautiful and are going to literally suck money from everywhere to Cupertino.
• Battery life is phenomenal. Have been playing with it non-stop for several hours and have just hit the 50% mark.
• Apple left a few nice details for those who don’t want to be totally locked into buying Apple content. All your iPhone apps can be loaded on without buying them again. Like an iPod, you can use iTunes to load music, videos, and DRM-free ePub books found at sites like FeedBooks and Google Books. There’s streaming video, audio, and text content via many free apps, namely ABC, Netflix, NPR, USA Today.
• Some third party apps like USA Today and the New York Times are seductively wonderful to peruse via touch, feeling like a glimpse of one possible future for publishing.
• All the iPhone apps ran without problems.

The Bad

• Wasn’t able to charge through a powered USB hub that the iPhone has no problems with. iPad charges when plugged directly into the back of the Mac Mini.
• Feels a little too heavy, and hard to hold in one hand for a long period of time. Games requiring two hands gets tiresome after a while.
• Ergonomics feel awkward when typing a lot of text, due to a number of factors: the keyboard and screen at the same level, the iPad being slightly too wide to type with two thumbs, and the slightly too-heavy weight. It all adds up to the feeling that my body has to conform to the device. I was worried about this from as early as the keynote video, where everyone was lifting a knee to rest the iPad on. Typing with two hands means resting the iPad flat, which means hunching over, looking straight down. Eventually, my wrists tire and the iPad wants to rest at an angle, which means either sitting in an odd position where your knees are propped up, holding the iPad with one hand and trying to type with the other, or looking for something to rest it against. Even with the iPad propped up and typing on a Bluetooth keyboard, I had to reach up to touch the screen, which might seem Minority-Report cool, but in practice, feels strange.
• The iPhone app 2x mode is passable, but looks noticeably pixellated, and some games are difficult to play. Developers will have to step up and design for the iPad’s higher resolution, because I can easily see many iPad users only buying iPad specific titles.
• The screen gets very smudgy with fingerprints, and whenever the screen goes dark, you can see your reflection in it.

Conclusion

The iPad is a solid computer for general web use. I can easily see leaving the MacBook at home and using only an iPad while traveling, and eschewing a Mac proper whenever jonesing for entertainment. Its appeal is its multifunction as a portable television, eBook Reader, web browser, email, and whatever apps get your goat. The iPad version of Crosswords, USA Today, Twitterific, and NPR are my personal killer apps. Am positive there will be many more.

Most early criticisms have been lack of Flash, camera, it’s just a big iPod Touch, and Apple is creating a walled garden. I now think none are an issue. There are plenty of apps, other options for entertainment, and sites eschewing Flash and reformatting for the iPad. I personally will use the iPhone as a camera and rarely use a web cam. The iPod Touch argument overlooks all the UI work Apple — and developers will do — to reformat apps for the larger screen. Lastly, there are definitely workarounds — the walled garden has a few slightly hidden holes and low walls to climb over if you really don’t want to spend money for Apple content.

My personal issue is the less-than-ideal feeling when doing a lot of typing and finding the ergonomics awkward. But this may be solved by some enterprising developer (how about a keyboard in circles near your thumbs) or a stand-maker. And many without hapless blogs will find this a non-issue.

I feel Apple got this 90% right, and that last 10% is an interesting area. One can criticize what the iPad doesn’t do or feels awkward — or see such areas as an opportunity. The iPad is literally, a clean, glossy, silky-smooth slate for someone else to scribble all over and create a killer app.

I believe Apple has nailed a very compelling vision of the future, and in some ways, revolutionary. With effortless software and the seductive power of touch, they are positioning content and app sales as a huge money-making opportunity, and effectively created an “end run” around the web browser. I actually see myself using iPad apps way more than Safari, expecting companies to create dedicated apps in addition to their web properties, or I won’t even bother with their websites — you’ll have to have an app for that. The Internet will be a pipe or repository of data, but the UI will include an app, and Apple the gatekeeper — that’s fairly huge.

Time will tell if Apple’s vision proves compelling to the public at large, but right now that future looks very much so, indeed.

One failing of the 3G iPhone is its short battery life. I got a car charger, but this mass transit hound spends days if not weeks sans automobile. Second, the car charger isn’t much good for air travel, either on a plane or in an airport, both times when a fully charged iPhone is sorely desired.

The solution: A portable battery / charger. I’ve been using the Tekkeon TekCharge MP1800.

The Good

• Large capacity, enough to charge an iPhone several times over. This is the main reason to go with this style of iPhone battery charger as opposed to the case style.
• Can charge other devices in addition to the iPhone. A USB port charges any USB device, and a variety of included power plugs can juice up various cell phones.
• Small. Thicker than an iphone but no larger than an iPhone screen; fits in a jacket pocket.

The Bad

• Charges via a USB cable as opposed to a wall outlet, which means charging at a computer before leaving home. The charging process takes overnight (8 hours).
• The included USB cable is strange; a travel rolling-up thing. The cord is flat and looks flimsy. I fear it’s slated for death by cats.
• A sliding switch with three modes: off, on, and a flashlight. Don’t get the last addition. The sliding switch could accidentally move to power-sapping mode, draining the battery. Must remember to turn the switch to “off” while charging.
• The only indicator is a sole LED that moves from green to orange to red based on how much charge is left. It seems to be constantly orange.

Conclusion

While my list of negatives appears long, the Tekkeon TekCharge MP1800 performs its core function of charging an iPhone well, which essentially trumps relatively minor gripes. Recommended.

The missing piece turns out to be the iPhone app and associated service: SimpleNote. The SimpleNote iPhone app is similarly, refreshingly minimal as Notational Velocity: a search field, a list of notes, and tapping on any note in the list opens it for editing.

After downloading the app to your iPhone, sign up for an account to the SimpleNote website. Your iPhone app will then sync with the website, where you can edit notes via a web interface.

Then you can get Notational Velocity editing these same notes. Fire up Notational Velocity, go to Preferences, and the Synchronization tab, and enter your SimpleNote account info. Do this for all your copies of Notational Velocity, and they’ll all remain in sync, editing the same notes.

Note: You can’t have two copies of Notational Velocity syncing both to SimpleNote and a DropBox folder (as I suggested in an earlier post), or an endless loop of documents will be appear. Make sure only one of your Notational Velocity apps is syncing to a DropBox. I set Notational Velocity on a Mac Mini syncing to DropBox, and reassigned the MacBook Notational Velocity to a folder in Documents.

So the end result: Notational Velocity on two Macs synced, plus an iPhone using SimpleNote. You can create and edit documents on any of the above and they remain in sync. Plus, all note files are backed up into DropBox.

Notational Velocity is a Mac desktop app that put simply, speeds up the writing process. With a little investment into how it works, thoughts can be put down in text form almost as fast as you can type. But its real killer use is in combination with DropBox (another service recently given the thumbs-up).

To start writing a new document, type a title in the top field and hit return, which takes you into the document’s body. Type away. To edit an existing document, type its title in the same field at top and your saved articles appear in a list, immediately below. So the top field does double duty as search or starting a new file — fairly brilliant.

All notes are saved automatically, so you can forget about file commands. You can set files to save into a designated folder, so you can forget about file management.

Now add in DropBox. Under Notational Velocity’s preferences, you can define a particular folder for Notational Velocity to save all of its documents to. Set up a sub-folder within DropBox. DropBox automagically uploads said files to the web, plus syncs the files across your computers, and even allows viewing via the iPhone.

Other nice features: Notational Velocity can save its files in text format, so they can be edited in other programs (and also be found in Spotlight), tags, lightning fast find/search/replace across files, spellcheck, and URLs are automatically active.

I’ve been testing Notational Velocity by editing blog articles across two Macs, and it’s worked flawlessly. Enough so, that I’m actually moving content out of Google Docs and into this desktop app. That may sound like a step backwards, but while the cloud is great for storage and syncing, a UI rendered in a browser always runs the risk of being slower than that of a desktop app. Using Notational Velocity plus DropBox means writing is as fast as possible, while the file management capabilities of the cloud do its syncing magic in the background.

Anyhow, if you haven’t completely given up on solid desktop apps for the cloud, give Notational Velocity a try.

Get Notational Velocity
Get DropBox

The app works just as described above, with a brief animation of a dotted-line outline indicating what part of the screen your window will resize to. The increase to full-screen option is nice, because the Mac’s own maximize button (the plus on the window) is notoriously unpredictable.

Nice touch: windows return to their original size when moved from a Cinch-determined position.

Since Cinch is an app, its preferences manage start up at login or access via menu bar icon.

Anyhow, this was one feature of Windows 7 that I was impressed with, so it’s nice to have on the Mac — makes switching much less unlikely. Get Cinch here.

According to the app, I’ve spent $360 bucks on iPhone apps. That’s actually lower than I feared, but on the other hand I could have bought thirty dog Snuggies.

The Good

• Lists apps in columns of name, category, and price, all of which are sortable if you click in the top column, so you can see the most expensive apps.
• Option to have the sum total appear in your menu bar — presumably as a painful reminder of your spending habits.

The Bad

• Prices are calculated when you launch the app based on what’s in the app store right now, so the price you originally paid may not appear, if the app has dropped in price. I know this is the case for Scrabble (now selling for $4.99, while I’m pretty sure I paid about ten bucks) and iDracula (now on sale for 99 cents). You can double-click on any displayed price and updated it with your own, however.

Conclusion

App Store Expense Monitor does what it claims, plus: it’s free. And I now have some ability to budget for my iPhone app addiction next year — which is, priceless.

ClickToFlash is a Safari add-on for that disallows Flash embeds from playing until you click on them.

The Good

• I’ve noticed the processor on my MacBook really revs up any time I visit a Flash-heavy web page. Therefore, using ClickToFlash means less fan-blasting, leading to longer battery life.
• To view a Flash element, one click is all you need to activate it, a good compromise between Flash overload and uninstalling Flash completely. After a click or two, videos on Hulu (which uses Flash extensively) played without any problems.
• Also acts as an ad blocker; you may be surprised to see how many ads use Flash.
• Flash areas appear with a pleasing gradient and no disruption to the page layout of any sites I checked out.

The Bad

• N/A.

Conclusion

After using ClickToFlash for a few days I’d recommend everyone give it a whirl. I haven’t missed Flash as much as I thought I would.

InstantShot! is a Mac OS X freeware program that does everything one could expect from a screen capture program and then some. If you find yourself reaching for Apple’s Grab and find it lacking, take the time to download and learn InstantShot! and you’ll never launch Grab again.

The Good

• Once launched, InstantShot! appears as an icon in the menu bar, providing easy access. 
• Several file formats (JPEG, PNG, TIFF) or copy the screen to the clipboard.
• Several options for what to grab and when: the full screen, rectangle, or a timer. The timer function is particularly useful if you want to take consecutive images of a video. While multiple shots are being taken, the icon changes as an indicator.
• Preferences give you even more options, which are too numerous to list here, but some of the more useful are:
• A custom save path and naming options. Go to Preferences > General.

• Different timings for multiple screenshots Go to Preferences > General.
  
• Custom default rectangle sizes Go to Preferences > Advanced.
  
• Start InstantShot! at login. Go to Preferences > System and check the box next to “Start InstantShot! at login”.
• Hotkeys for the most common image capture functions. Go to Preferences > Hotkeys. I set my basic screen shot to Option + Shift + S.

• Assigning scripts to the images after they’re created. Go to Preferences > System.

The Bad

Due to all the functionality in a small space, some of the functions are a bit obscure and even overwhelming.

Conclusion

InstantShot! has become a necessity on both our Macs — one of the few programs I set to launch at startup. Definitely check it out if you take a lot of screen grabs on a regular basis.

Download InstantShot!

I recently reviewed SuperDocker, a Mac OS X freeware program that lets you change the appearance of the OS X dock using various themes. Reader Mike suggested checking out CandyBar, a shareware program that also allows easy customization of the Dock but is a management solution for all your Mac icons. After a few minutes of using CandyBar, I think it’s a much better program.

The Good

• A well-designed interface, using an iTunes-like sidebar, plus drag and drop to apply icons. Applying a set of icons icons to the dock or system is just a matter of selecting what you want to apply and then clicking a button to apply. And there are “Restore” buttons to return everything to the system defaults.
• Many cool, custom icon sets are available at the IconFactory — the icons are provided in a package called an iContainer which you just double click to load into CandyBar, or drag into the CandyBar sidebar. I used to download IconFactory icons back in the OS 9 days, so it was fun to rediscover their work and realize they’ve developed alongside OS X.
• A “Quick Drop” area if you want to apply a custom icon to just one file or application.
• You can even get deeper with your icons with search (icons from IconFactory have tags), list view, and even “smart collections.”

The Bad

• A bit of a wait when selecting the Applications option as CandyBar locates programs to apply icons to.

Conclusion

Forget what I wrote about Superdocker. The better program by far is CandyBar, based on the variety of icons and ease of use. It’s a free demo for 15 days and then costs $29.

SuperDocker is a Mac OS X app that customizes your Leopard dock using “themes.” It also tweaks miscellaneous settings for the Finder, Dashboard, and Safari progress bar.

The Good

• Once you have SuperDocker installed on your Mac, installation of a new dock theme is easy — just download a theme from the SuperDocker website (file extension .dockSD3) and double click it to install. Reverting back to the default Leopard theme is also easy: click on “Dock” in the SuperDocker sidebar and click the “Restore” button under Appearance.

The Bad

• After a few minutes of browsing the selections, I only found a few I thought were worth installing. Hopefully the selection will improve over time. I’d also like to see more options for the “2D” dock.
• I’m a bit confused as to why these other settings are included in this program. Customization of the Safari progress bar is one of those “problems” I never knew I had, and the Finder and Dashboard settings seem like the kitchen sink thrown in.

Conclusion

If you’re bored with your glossy, 3D dock appearance, SuperDocker will let you change it. But I’d advise checking out the available themes to see if like any of them, first.

The Netflix / Roku box just arrived, and after a mere half hour of playing with it, I’m blown away. It’s compelling, affordable, and above all, super easy to set up and use. It’s even better than the Apple TV in several ways, and that’s really something coming from me, a clinically diagnosed Apple fan.

The Good

• If you already have a Netflix account, the box is only $99.99. There are no extra monthly fees, or fees for any of the content. It’s essentially Netflix “watch now” on your television.
• Set-up was ridiculously easy. It’s a box, remote, and a video cable. There are component, HDMI, and optical audio outputs. The box boots up to a step-by-step series of screens to enter your WiFi password, and gives you a code to enter on the NetFlix website to authorize the device. The whole process took a mere five minutes.
• The Netflix website is used to make content available to the box. On the website, you get a new tab for an “instant” queue which has its own browsing area. Any of the red “add” buttons now have an “instant” tab so you can tell what movies are available to watch using the box.
• The selection is surprisingly huge, mostly consisting of back catalog movies, TV shows, and bizarre stuff I’ve never heard of. Still, I quickly filled my “instant” queue with hours of viewing fun — original Battlestar Galactica, How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days, Beetlejuice, Ghost Busters, Fay Grim, and Real Genius. But the content is all-you-can-watch, so does it really matter what corn is piled on?
• I was worried that the streaming nature of the box would mean low picture quality, but it’s actually quite decent — a little below a DVD. Definitely not HD, but I can’t complain about essentially free viewing content.

The Bad

• The UI isn’t as pretty as Apple’s. Most notably hokey is the pause / rewind interface.
• It’s yet another box to add to your entertainment system, and kind of goofy looking at that (the remote in particular looks like a kid’s toy). Luckily, the box is only about 5 inches square.
• The selection skimps on new releases.

Conclusion

In comparison to the Apple TV, the Netflix box is surprisingly compelling. I found it easier to set up and use because it has only one function: browse and watch movies. The selection is arguably superior to Apple TV in number of movies and cost, and lacks restrictions on rentals.

The Apple TV does win out in a few areas: newer movies, better video quality (HD content), photos, music, and streaming content from a computer, the latter of which I find essential for the movies I do own.

But the Netflix / Roku box has basically torpedoed my movie rentals on the Apple TV. It’s essentially on demand television gone crazy, like Joost that actually works and in the living room. It even has me thinking I’ll cut down on those little red envelopes I’ve been churning through.

Today, it was announced that this Netflix streaming service will be coming to the XBOX. Owners of that game console are in for a huge treat.

I can’t expect Apple will sit still with this development, so I’d expect either a huge push toward more content or an easing of video restrictions. We may be seeing the beginning of a new video war, similar to HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but in this case, hopefully us viewers will reap all the benefits.

What started cracking me up are some of the holes are totally impossible for anybody to make their way through, and the panic on the faces as a big wall comes toward them and they inevitably take a dunk. Also hilarious is the variety of situations such a simple set up can inspire — sometimes the wall is destroyed as it hits the people, or a person will climb up the wall and get dragged through the water.

Anyhow I’ll post some of the more amusing ones and if you’d like to investigate this further there are many more on YouTube.

Here’s a site worth poking around on: How I Spent My Stimulus (check). Pretty much every tax-paying American is getting about $600 bucks from the federal government to spend as they please. The site has pictures and short anecdotes from people of all walks of life describing what they spent their money on and why.

Each short post is categorized by what the money went toward, so through a cursory glance, we can see what most people using their checks for:

1. Travel & Vacation (99)
2. Vehicle & Gas (91)
3. Other (89)
4. Debt / Credit Card (78)
5. Home & Garden (70)
6. Invest / Savings (59)

Rather mixed, but it seems the economy hasn’t totally gone off the rails, as a lot of folks are still travelling. Still, the high number for “vehicle and gas” does imply a lot of folks are dealing with the higher gas prices.

Then, there’s the “Weird” section. My favorites: Second Life, Transformers, sex toys, Terminator 2 video game, and tattoos.

As for us? We still haven’t received ours. But I already know what part of it will be used for.

aideRSS analyzes RSS feeds, and if pushed it a bit further, can be used to filter blog feeds to only serve up the “best stuff.”

At aideRSS, just enter the blog or RSS feed URL that you want to analyze. The site generates a table of all the feeds recent posts and its activity in terms of comments, Google Reader shares, Delicious saves, Diggs, and Tweets.

The far left column lists a new metric called “PostRank” which uses the stats mentioned above to generate a number from one to ten. You can click on the header of the PostRank column to sort by “PostRank”.

Where the service becomes interesting is the filtering: you can click on the headings listed Good Posts, Great Posts, Best Posts, and Top 20 to sort the table in different ways. The “Top 20″ view has a lot of appeal as it only shows the posts with the best conversations. Each of these views are output as RSS feeds which you can use as you like in other services.

Since I’m sensitive to information overload, my immediate thought was to populate Google Reader with “Best Posts” aideRSS feeds, filtering some of the more prolific blogs (TechCrunch, ValleyWag, io9 come to mind) that are often overwhelming.

Last but not least, widgets displaying these filtered feeds are also available for display on a blog.

The Good

• Service is easy to use and simple to understand.
• The filtered aideRSS feeds are openly available in RSS.

The Bad

• If you’re a blogger who cares about RSS feed subscription numbers as reported by FeedBurner, I imagine aideRSS may lower it, as a subscriber to an aideRSS-generated feed won’t hit your blog or FeedBurner URL. Personally, I could care less, but if aideRSS catches on, I’d expect a conversation about “stealing feeds” to hit the blogosphere. Update: aideRSS does report their subscription numbers back to FeedBurner; see comment below.
• The desire of bloggers to manage their own feeds means a WordPress plug-in or a new FeedBurner feature with similar functionality might have more appeal.
• The statistics used to generate PostRank could use more social services: Reddit, Technorati links, and FriendFeed come to mind.

Conclusion

On the surface, aideRSS is a blogger’s tool to analyze the popularity of their posts. But for blog readers, it could prove useful as a filter to find the best articles to read.

In iTunes, this Keren Ann album is priced at the standard $9.99. Individual songs are $.99. This album is noted as “iTunes Plus” meaning no DRM and encoded at a high bit rate in AAC. There’s also a “digital booklet” — a PDF of liner notes and cover art.

On Amazon, the same album is a dollar cheaper, at $8.91. Individual songs are $.99. Amazon also eschews DRM and offers a high bit rate MP3. There’s no digital booklet.

So Amazon’s version of the same album was essentially on par with iTunes, and since it’s MP3 with no DRM it would be playable in iTunes and on an iPod.

Actually downloading the music to my computer was a bit convoluted. I had to first install a program called Amazon MP3 Downloader. It is required for album purchases, but not for individual song purchases.

The downloader first launched Safari, although I was using Firefox at the time. I then had to download and open an .amz file in the MP3 downloader. But finally, I got this nice screen:

After downloading, the files were placed in a new folder (Music/Amazon MP3) and automatically imported into iTunes.

Here’s the stats on one of the songs:

The Good

• Some albums are cheaper than iTunes.
• On par with iTunes in terms of quality.
• DRM-less MP3s.

The Bad

• Smaller selection.
• Ordering process is not as easy as iTunes.

Conclusion

If you’re buying single tracks, there’s little difference between iTunes and Amazon, but for full albums there’s an opportunity to save a buck or two. As for DRM: while Apple is moving in that direction, they still differentiate between iTunes Plus and regular iTunes which is needlessly confusing. With Amazon, all tracks are DRM-free. Perhaps Apple should just make everything “iTunes Plus” and do away with that moniker. And a price drop to stay competitive goes without saying.

At present, I feel the Amazon MP3 Download service is appealing enough that for every digital album purchase in the future, I’ll check out Amazon just to see if I can save a few clams.

Last night I checked out FriendFeed, a new social networking website that fellow blogger Louis Gray invited me to. FriendFeed pulls together your social news activity from other popular websites into one feed. Sounds simple enough, but there are a few additional features that pushed it into the “useful” column for me. It also has a Twitter-like simplicity that makes participation very easy.

When you sign up for a FriendFeed account, you’re asked to pull in data from many Web 2.0 sites you have an account at — namely Amazon, your blog, del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Furl, Google Reader, Google Shared Stuff, Gmail / Google Talk, iLike, Jaiku, Last.fm, LinkedIn, Ma.gnolia, Netflix, Pandora, Picasa, Pownce, Reddit, SmugMug, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Upcoming, Vimeo, Yelp, YouTube, and Zoomr (whew).

FriendFeed then pulls in any update you make on those sites into one “FriendFeed” feed. You can then share this feed with other people and check out other users’ feeds.

The kicker: All feed items have comments, ratings (click the “like” link), and a delete button (say you have some embarrassing stuff in your Netflix Queue). These last morsels of social interactivity, personally, is what won me over regarding FriendFeed.

The Good:

• It provides an alternative to the FaceBook Social Timeline.
• The comments and ratings concept is similar to Digg, but the hurdle of link submission is lessened.
• It’s close to Twitter simplicity. Just by doing stuff I do normally on Twitter, Google Reader, NetFlix, and this blog, my FriendFeed will be updated automatically. After that, leaving comments and ratings on FriendFeed itself doesn’t seem like a big commitment.
• It may actually prove to be useful: I could see reading other people’s feeds and commenting back and forth helping me to find new and interesting stuf — and ultimately, more content for this here blog.

The Bad:

• It seems useful only to those that participate in tons of social networking sites — meaning, a pretty small niche of early adopters. It’s right on the edge for me, as I’m only using Google Reader, NetFlix, and Twitter with any regularity. If I had only one account at NetFlix FriendFeed would be pointless.
• I couldn’t figure out how to block updates from friends of friends.

Anyhow, so far, I give FriendFeed the thumbs up. Here’s my FriendFeed Feed.

Despite all my personal biases as to why I should avoid Hulu like the plague, I have to say it works well enough, and I’ll use it in the future.

Why I really want to dislike Hulu:

1. It’s the product of “old media” broadcasting corporations — the television folks who tend to not “get it,” and based on past evidence, this website from News Corp. and NBC should suck hard.
2. NBC pulled many shows out of iTunes Store, which I love, and moved them to Hulu. More specifically — it’s a sure bet Battlestar Galactica will appear there next year instead of iTunes. For this alone I should be pissed enough to boycott Hulu.
3. I’ve complained before that I don’t like intrusive ads and I am willing to pay for a download to avoid them. Hulu is streaming and they stick ads in there. My mouth becomes dry and I scowl.

But why I will begrudgingly use Hulu:

1. Without iTunes, my only options are piracy, watching video on a site without legal rights to the content, or go back to terrestrial television. I try hard to be honest, and the last option is somehow defeatist.
2. It’s free. I find with the price point of zero I can tolerate the few ads (which I completely ignore) if the content is compelling enough for me to stick with it.
3. The site is clean, easy to navigate, and the video interface is competently designed.
4. Content is king. I actually want to watch these shows.
5. There’s a full screen option. I can hook the laptop up to the television.

So basically, I feel the good points of Hulu outweigh the negatives.

This year I think old media finally woke up and is starting to “get it” — from USAToday to Newsweek and now Hulu. I’ve been visiting ABC.com to watch their streaming video, and I’ll likely turn to Hulu for NBCs.

The big, old boys can easily add streaming video to their sites — and they hold legitimate rights to the content. Companies like Joost really need to up the quality of the content they’re providing — start lining up agreements for more and more currently running programs — or their appeal may fade.

It’s been a while since I checked out a new Web 2.0 website, but I had an invite for Spock lying around and finally decided to check it out. It’s a search engine for people and the relationships between them.

Spock is a little scary. I say this because after I logged in for the first time about a month ago, I’m pretty sure more information about me was dug up — seemingly automatically. I think Spock checked out Technorati and added the people that consider my blog a favorite, and it seems to be pulling in information from MySpace, LinkedIn, and other sites.

How do they justify this? I suppose all this information is already online in some form and all Spock is doing is the research and putting it in one place. But as with Google Maps Street View, it’s kinda odd to see the disparate information in one spot linked with your name. As an example, my brother is in Spock, due to one of his social network profiles.

But in three steps, Spock gets you in their system. First, I’m already listed without my consent. Second, I noticed inaccurate or missing information and felt an uncontrollable urge to fix it so nobody would be led astray (I added by blog and Twitter info). Third, there are other people with the same name as me, and I felt a duty to differentiate myself from the other JKs out there. This is an interesting way of getting people to sign up for a Web 2.0 service. A sneaky strategy would be to seed it with slightly inaccurate information (like the incorrect marital status or quotes not attributed to you) just to goad people into signing up.

Spock also allows you to define relationships between other people’s profiles and your own.

Anyhow, I certainly found Spock amusing. I’ll definitely check it out occasionally to make sure my profile isn’t full of errors.

I owe Smalltown a review because they put a coffee mug on my doorstep. This nice, vaguely Web 1.0 gesture fits in with their business model which is based around the local community. After checking out the site, they’ve built something fairly impressive, but unfortunately, I didn’t care for the user interface.

Smalltown is a user-generated community site promoting local businesses and connecting them with the local community. This is done with “Webcards.” The closest real-world analogy is the big bulletin board in your local coffee shop; plastered with business cards from local folks offering services, along with stuff for sale, piano lessons, and the like. Businesses create these “Webcards” on Smalltown and users can respond with ratings and reviews. Check out these slick promotional videos to get a better introduction from Smalltown itself.

I like the idea. After living in San Mateo and Belmont for several years, I have some opinions about the local restaurants and businesses, so I’m somewhat motivated to participate on a local reviews site. Another smart move was starting with two cities. When I first checked them out, they were only covering San Mateo and Burlingame. They’ve since added Belmont, Foster City, Hillsborough, and Millbrae. I guess this way they can solidify their technology with a smaller audience before trying to do the whole country all at once, although at this rate, it could take several years before the even have the Bay Area dialed.

Despite some good ideas, I really do take issue with Smalltown’s design. They use a Flash front end that adds a level of opacity to the information. I ended up with the feeling that I wasn’t interacting with the information but instead the interface.

Reading a restaurant’s reviews means clicking on the title of said restaurant’s Webcard to open it, and then the menu sticking out on the right side. Adding a star rating on the title bar requires writing a review. Personally, I’d rather see all the cards expanded and scroll down, rather than constantly clicking each Webcard to open them.

To see a local review site with an interface I prefer, check out Yelp, and for classifieds, I appreciate the bare-bones function-over-design of Craigslist. Both seem to own the Web 2.0 space of reviews and classifieds, and as a result, I think Smalltown has a real upward climb ahead of them. I like their idea; it’s just their execution I’m not into.

I’ll probably revisit Smalltown in a few months and see if they’ve improved their interface. Meanwhile, I’ll continue drinking coffee out of their cool coffee mug.

Google recently added a new feature to the already outstanding Google Maps: My Maps. I spent some time playing around with it for purely self-serving reasons: to note exactly where the heck we went on our Japan trip, before I forget.

Here’s the map we’re putting together: Webomatica’s Japan Trip

Anyhow, if you’ve played around with Google Maps, adding your own markers is just another layer of interaction. Using the some simple drawing tools, you can add markers, lines, shapes, and descriptions including pictures and links using standard HTML.

After you login, under the My Maps tab, click “Create new map”. You’re presented with a blank map of the Earth. You can add a marker by searching Google Maps for a location. Click on a resulting marker, and there will be a link in the word balloon saying “Save to My Maps”. That’s all you need to do to add a marker to your map. You can also add a marker to your map by clicking and dragging from the marker button.

From the word balloon, you can edit a marker’s title, description (which supports HTML), and icon. There’s also a delete link. You can also drag a marker around the map to place it.

Using the line tool is similarly intuitive. You click once to determine the start point, and subsequent clicks on the map define new points. A double click ends the line. As with a marker, you can add a title, edit the description, and change the color, width, and opacity of the line. This tool is useful for noting a driving route or walking tour.

The shape tool is for defining closed areas. You can edit a shape’s title, description, and color.

Now for the cool stuff: All the objects created on the map show up in the left column. Anybody checking out your map can easily jump to any element you’ve created by clicking on the list.

Next, you can elect to make your map public or unlisted. Public maps will show up in Google search results. Unlisted maps (the default) can still be linked to — the URL is at “Link to this Page” in the upper right corner.

As you can see on the Webomatica’s Japan Trip map, I was able to get a couple of locations added pretty quickly, including particular icons for the location’s purpose, and adding some small photographs using standard HTML.

That said, there were a few things I couldn’t figure out:

• A way to move a whole line as one unit.
• How to move a shape as one unit after it’s drawn.
• How to change the order of the items in the list on the left.

But there are tons of possibilities. I can imagine collaborative map editing. Or pulling in an RSS feed and creating markers for all the locations contained within.

There’s one application that would totally kick tail: A GPS enabled camera, that automatically adds location as meta data to your photographs. Then, after uploading all your photos, some service uses that location data plus time to create a Google My Maps trail. Holy crap, that would be awesome.

Additional Reading: Search Engine Journal, Cyber Net, Techdirt, ArsTechnica

This guest post is by Dave Papandrew, one of the founders of Fanpop, a cool Web 2.0 sites for fans of anything under the sun. He checked out the Web 2.0 site Scribd, and here are his impressions.

Scribd is a site that completely evaded my web 2.0 “radar” until I ran across the glowing reviews from Techcrunch this weekend. Now, just because a site gets a great review from Techcrunch doesn’t always mean it’s something to write home about, so I was sufficiently skeptical. In this case, however, after actually spending some time using the site, I do think that the hype is very real and the kudos are well-deserved.

So what is Scribd? Probably the best description is a YouTube for text documents and ebooks. The site’s straightforward purpose can be found in some marketing text on the homepage, “Scribd is a free online library…”. The expectation is that content creators will post their documents online so other users can search and consume these documents.

On the content sharing side of the equation, users are able to upload documents in a variety of supported file formats (pdf, doc, ppt, xls, txt and more). These original documents are converted into .pdf format and accessible via a nifty Flash reader (though simpler formats like .txt are generally presented as HTML text). The Flash reader is very functional and features standard pagination functions, document resizing, magnification, printing, and even a rudimentary search feature. The Flash reader is embedable (now does it remind you of YouTube?) and other standard features like commenting, rating, tagging, and easy adding to social media sites like digg and reddit are available. Clearly, the Scribd team has done its homework when it comes to implementing all the hallmarks of a successful Web 2.0 idea. There are even digg-like lists of most popular items that help you documents generating the most “buzz” for the day.

Design-wise, the site is very clean and easy to navigate. Conceptually, the site is a snap to understand — a far cry from some Web 2.0 sites that leave me scratching my head as to what exactly I’m expected to do.

The content is varied and uneven, which is entirely to be expected in the realm of user-generated content. It remains to be seen what kind of content the site will attract over the long haul. The early signs are very positive. I was able to find several articles of interest. And, if the list of the most popular items is any sign, Scribd will benefit from some high-quality link bait with articles like “Best-Kept Secrets of the World’s Best Companies” and “20 Signs that You Have Grown Up”.

In any event, I’m bookmarking Scribd. This is a great concept. In some ways, it seems so obvious. It shares some similarities to self-publishing sites like HubPages, but seems to posses a much savvier strategy in harnessing already created documents. And yes, there’s a hefty dose of YouTube here, but I also see some comparisons to Wikipedia with respect to Scribd’s potential as a repository for knowledge.

That being said, I’m hesitant to get too frothy on Scribd. I’ve made no mention of a revenue model, since there doesn’t seem to be one present. Will they go the advertising route? Or will they look at a transaction-based model? This remains to be seen.

Spam and unauthorized use of copyrighted material are two other big question marks (I’m sure the Scribd guys are looking closely at these issues). I’m also interested to see how this fits in with Google’s plans to digitize the worlds written materials. While Google’s efforts in this space appear to have been largely in-house (and in conjunction with research institutions), could Scribd’s direct play to the end-user once again outflank the big boys in the same way YouTube managed to run circles around their competitors?

Only time will tell, but in the meantime I suggest you head over to Scribd and give it a test drive.

Thanks Dave! I’m wishing I had checked out Scribd instead. Anyhow, please check out Dave’s site: Fanpop.

Twitter is strangely compelling. While many wonder what the point is and whether it’s jumping the shark, I’m still intrigued enough to keep messing with it. I think I’ve found my use for it, in conjunction with this blog, for personal stuff too trivial to warrant a full post. In addition, I’ll go out on a limb and say Twitter has huge mainstream possibilities, because it’s way easier than blogging.

Twitter seems to fill a small space between IM, MyBlogLog, email, and blogs. The biggest difference from IM is that it’s asynchronous — not time sensitive. Meaning, a message stays up until it’s replaced by a new one. It’s also not directed towards one user — it goes out to all your “friends” or “followers.” This is where the social networking aspect comes in, as you collect contacts, reminding me of MyBlogLog. There isn’t a specific Twitter client (although I found this one for the Mac, Twitterific). You can twitter from the web, a cell phone, or IM client. It’s basically like texting from anywhere to everybody. Twitter suggests one should “tweet” about what they’re currently doing with their so-called-lives, but it could be filled with anything textual.

So how will I use Twitter? I think Twitter-space will be perfect for little personal info-nuggets, totally trivial stuff that I want to toss out there, but too short for a full post, and I have no interest in its posterity.

Twitter may fill my desire to get more personal but not clutter up the primary content of this blog. Generally speaking, I’ve avoided talking in great detail about my personal life in blog posts for a few reasons:

1. I don’t want personal details about my daily activities splattered all over the Internet.
2. My life is relatively dull. Much of my day-to-day activities aren’t worth writing an entire paragraph about, let alone a blog entry.

So in my blog sidebar, I’ve added a section for Twitter. It being in the sidebar and changing often means it has less chance of being picked up by search engines as a stand alone article.

In conclusion, I think Twitter has huge mainstream appeal (as Mathew Ingram notes, it’s similar to how teenagers use IM). It takes serious effort to write an entire paragraph for a decent blog post, while it takes practically none to twitter a sentence every once in a while. It fills that last space of narcissism, where anybody who’s alive can participate. If you can answer the most common question asked over a friendly phone call: “So what’s new with you?” you can Twitter.

What’s strange is in Twitter space, a single line of text with the most mundane crap like: “I went to the dentist and read People magazine” has a haiku-like significance. Plus, “twitter” works as a verb.

So please check out my Twitter page, see Robert Scoble’s in action, and if you’re a regular reader, check out the service yourself. Consider signing up so I’ll have more people to Twitter to.

Note: Here’s a great page with Twitter resources (hat tip Steve Rubel). 

Additional Reading: Paris Lemon, Joe Duck, Mark Evans, Neville Hobson

Anybody with a fascination for Web 2.0 websites owes it to themselves to check out how USAToday, the daily national newspaper, has redesigned their website. They’ve basically taken a huge leap ahead into the social news future.

Who knows if this future is a happy one, but it will be fun to watch it evolve, and I’m bookmarking the site — even though I’m not a regular USAToday reader nor have I used the site in the past. It’s that compelling.

For starters, every article has a recommend option — without a login. Go ahead, click an “up arrow” icon, you’ll see the number increase. This impacts what headlines appear on the front page. All the headlines link to content on the USAToday site. USAToday also takes a stab at blogs, as every story now supports comments — with a user login of course. But what’s an effect of having users login? Well, you instantly an opportunity for a web-based community. So each user has a profile page, and a personal avatar appears next to their comments throughout the site.

Can you see why this is pretty interesting? USAToday has, in one fell swoop, gone from being just another newspaper petrified of the future, to an interactive site with many of the Web 2.0 trappings — community, comments, ratings, and user profiles. And right away, this site has some advantages over many Web 2.0 startups — content, reporters, writes, editors, and readers.

I even drilled down into the movie reviews and noticed that you can review a movie and rate it from one to five stars. The ratings are added up and the average star rating is listed for said movie. Obviously, the folks at USAToday have spent a lot of time digging into details, and thinking about what cool stuff could come from all the user interactivity.

I really hope this succeeds and boosts the traffic to USAToday.com. This could be a way forward for newspapers that are being squeezed by a scary future. They certainly earn credit for giving it a try rather than sitting still and waiting to be pushed. Even if it might be an idea ahead of its time.

Note: For the opposite view, check out some of the annoyed reader comments on the site — complaints that the improvements are pointless, the design is confusing and cluttered, and questioning the need to get social and build community around a newspaper. All valid concerns.

Additional Reading: TechCrunch, RexBlog, Trends in the Living Networks, 10e20, BaronVC

Joost is definitely worth checking out. It’s essentially a stand alone application that essentially turns your computer into an on-demand television.

I’m pretty sure Joost uses some sort of P2P technology to download video. But much of the innovation lies in how the technical workings are wisely kept behind the scenes. This is super important as it maintains a simple user experience. As a user, I really don’t care about the bandwidth used or download speed. I just want to watch video.

I found the UI — a tad confusing at first — relatively intuitive and unobtrusive. There’s a shift from active interaction to passive. Watching a video is as simple as browsing through channels, selecting a show, and it plays. It made me realize how brain dead simple television is, and how much work computers have to do to recreate this experience. Joost is a pretty good step towards keeping it simple.

Once I felt like the technology was stable (yes, this really is video on demand!), I could relax, and start browsing for stuff. Which is where the biggest, predictable problem lies — not enough content. Hopefully this will soon change, as Viacom just signed with Joost.

Still, even among the limited options, I found some cool stuff that I’ll return for — old episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle, indie shorts, and Indian music videos. Obviously, right now, cable plus Tivo blows Joost away. But Joost could conceivably scale to programming from around the world plus everything on the Internet.

And here’s the kicker: Joost is free. Supposedly there are ads that pop up from time to time, but I didn’t see a single one during an hour or so of Joost browsing.

In the end, it’s all about options. In the near future, it’s clear there’s going to be some compelling combination of the Internet, the computer, and the TV. Joost provides some clues as to what this could be like.

Note: Thanks to ParisLemon for sending me an invite. Here’s his take on Joost.

Additional Reading: Andy Bennett, Scobleizer, Engadget, 901 am

The social website construction set Ning recently released a big upgrade and was profiled by Techcrunch. It was really slow for much of yesterday, so I didn’t get a chance to check it out. But I finally got in, and have some thoughts.

Ning combines two technology trends:

1. Web 2.0 social websites: user-created content distribution (YouTube, Digg [links as content], Yelp), and social networking (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster).

2. User-friendly tools for website creation. There are many desktop and web-based applications for creating static HTML websites, while for dynamic, database driven sites, there are server based content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Ning combines these two trends: allowing the drag-and-drop creation of dynamically driven websites that include social Web 2.0 features: member management, blogs, forums, photos, videos, ratings, RSS.

My initial impression is: wow.

The step-by-step process reduces many Web 2.0 concepts to features. You drag and drop modules right onto the page. The editing of a site’s theme is so simple it’s brain dead. You can choose from pre-made themes, tweak colors, and upload images. There’s an “Advanced” tab so one can add and tweak the CSS. I found the settings very intuitive and obvious to anybody who’s used Dreamweaver or even WordPress.

Check out this Battlestar Galactica “Ning” — a fan site for Battlestar Galactica, with a blog, photos, and videos. Also check out this Fat Cats Washington DC “Ning”. It’s for rating restaurants. Note how different these two sites are in design, and even functionality to a large degree, yet both appear to have been made largely made with the simple site creation interface.

Toying with Ning, I got the same feeling I had playing around with Yahoo! Pipes. Someone has taken something that was previous difficult for an average user and made it simple. Someone has also appealed to the creative side in me, except instead of creating content it’s a whole site.

What are the positives? Well, for starters, this opens up the creation of a social site to anybody with a decent idea. There are tons of cool subjects too “niche” to warrant their own business model. A user could create a family reunion website, where relatives can upload photographs or talk about their memories in a forum. Or, say you’re into some obscure subject like vintage Hawaiian dart boards, of which there are only fifty experts worldwide. You can now create a fun, social site with many bells and whistles for free.

Ning benefits as a huge “long tail” play. They probably hope to inspire thousands of micro-social sites where each has less than a hundred users, but added together they could form a juggernaut.

Second, judging from MySpace, people really like extensive customization options. Even if a site ends up looking like total ass, allowing that personal stamp can be another way to encourage community.

The creation of a social site network is also a way to get around the ever-growing complaint of “social site fatigue” — having too many Web 2.0 sites to keep track of, where every new one joined means falling off an older one. Once a user has signed up for one Ning site, it will be easier for them to participate in any other Ning-hosted ones.

What are some downsides? Well, if you make a Ning-hosted site, it seems you don’t own it or any of the content. Also, with the free model, you don’t benefit from any of the ads that are displayed. There seems to be a “premium” option with a monthly fee that allows “revenue access”.

The second downside is I have two sites stored on my own server. Maybe in the future, Ning will follow the open source model and allow users to install the software on their own servers.

In conclusion, Ning reduces much of what used to be a stand-alone Web 2.0 web site into nothing more than easily copyable features. That’s huge. Future business models might include building networks (as Blogger or WordPress.com are networks for blogs) or thankfully, technology that’s more innovative than just ratings, forums, videos, and photos. The bar has been raised.

Lastly, the most exciting thing about Ning is how it empowers users to create more than just content — now we get to create the sites themselves. I think a while back I imagined that user-created distribution could be one aspect of Web 3.0. I think at least, Ning is a cool attempt at Web 2.1.

Additional Reading: Oatmeal Stout, Complexity and Social Networks Blog, Raving Lunacy, Marketing Shift, Mathew Ingram, Frantic Industries

So I wanted to actually mess around with Yahoo! Pipes, which was down most of today, before commenting on it. I finally got in, and it’s pretty slick. It didn’t take much time to figure out how to use it, and make a simple pipe: one that pulls feeds from Megite, Techmeme, and Tailrank, and searches for Apple related news. Here’s the pipe.

I found using the pipe editor pretty easy, and I’m only scratching the surface. Basically there are modules that take data in while others perform operations. You link them together by clicking and dragging from outlets to inlets. Finally, the data is output in RSS format to do with as you will. Here’s a more complex pipe explanation at O’Reilly Radar. I also noticed that the Apple News pipe I created, became an object I could use in a new pipe.

The closest analogy I’m familiar with is a really cool music program called Max/MSP that started out as a way to manipulate MIDI data in real time, but eventually got into signal processing. It uses a graphical, module environment connected by “wires.” The stuff you can do with it is mind-boggling. The “patches” can also be saved as stand-alone audio processing programs.

But back to Pipes. It’s important to note that in the future, this won’t be just limited to RSS feeds. First, technology enabled average folks to record their own music and videos on home computers. Web 2.0 has allowed people to distribute this media over the internet. Much has been made of this user-created content spreading all over the place. So what’s the next conceivable step? Certainly, average people create their own dynamic web sites. It’s not so far fetched when you think about how today, FrontPage and iWeb allow folks to make pretty nice looking static HTML pages.

So I’m already thinking about how I might try to create my own newspaper with Yahoo! Pipes, that spits out one feed that I can subscribe to in my feed reader. I’m hoping in the future, I could output data into a web page I’ve designed myself, essentially creating my own portal.

On another note, I’m really impressed this is coming from Yahoo!. I read at Business 2.0 beta that the person spearheading this is flickr’s Caterina Fake. This might be a way of brainstorming a cool integration of all of Yahoo!‘s Web 2.0 acquisitions: let users mess with the data served up by these sites and see what emerges. Why leave only the content to the users? How about just let them design the sites, too?

Instead of coming up with more “me too” Web 2.0 stuff, Yahoo! has just jumped ahead to Web 3.0. I’m totally serious!

Note: Check out this BusinessWeek article talking about “Brickhouse”: a new division within Yahoo! that helped develop this idea internally. It also touches on MyBlogLog, a service that I use regularly and Yahoo! acquired recently. This is the kind of thinking that gets peanut butter out of your mouth, IMHO.

Additional Reading: Ars Technica, Mathew Ingram, Wired, O’Reilly Radar

I played around a bit with Technorati’s new WTF service. “WTF” stands for “Where’s The Fire,” not what… you might be thinking. It’s kind of an odd approach, but the more I think about it, it has potential. Rather than a link-submission thing, a closer analogy is as a user-rated comments / Wikipedia — and a Wikipedia where you can’t edit others’ contributions.

Basically, it’s a combination of several ideas. You start out with a topic, which you choose, and you are asked define. Most obviously this could be something that people are searching for or blogging about, but it quite literally could be anything of your choosing. So right off the bat, submissions are going to be organized much more finely than just broad topics of movies, technology, apple (as they are on digg).

The second aspect is that a “blurb” is written about said topic, which can consist of one link or many links, but also could just be a written paragraph or two. By removing the requirement of a link, this “blurb” could basically be a definition: hence my thought of a Wikipedia entry, or even a comment regarding said topic.

The last aspect worth mentioning is that the blurbs, once submitted, can be ranked by other Technorati users and therefore rise or fall in importance.

So it’s interesting. I made a first blurb based on the topic of “cats”. It’s just a paragraph of liking cats with a few links to popular cat sites. We’ll see if it gets popular, but right now it’s the first.

Interesting: Cats.

Another interesting item of note, if you do a standard Technorati search of the indexed blogs, the WTF entry appears above all the search items. Perhaps this is meant as incentive to get more users adding WTF entries to topics, but entering in a WTF about your favorite subject, right now, will likely be the first.

Interesting: Cats on top.

It seems many are starting out by putting links to other sites or their own blogs (as with Digg) in these WTF blurbs. But I think the service will wind up being used differently, and could end up being very appealing, because it’s obviously much easier to write a comment or a short paragraph definition than a long article.

So anyhow, I can’t predict how successful this will be in the long run. But it might alleviate some concerns that as far as blog search is concerned (which is supposed to be Technorati’s purpose) is kind of floundering. One complaint I have is that Technorati includes MySpace blogs. Therefore, a search for even “WTF” returns many usages of that term in say… its more common understood meaning. Now, someone has defined “WTF” at least as how Technorati wants to, via a blurb (I think I should add the more common meaning for laughs, plus to see if it can get higher in the user ratings). I’ve also noticed I’m not using Technorati as much to search for blogs, instead turning to Megite, Techmeme, and MyBlogLog. So this move might pull me back to using Technorati, using it more like a social news site.

I could see things going either way: since its use isn’t that clearly defined, it might lead to tons of different blurb styles, hence hampering its reliability. But in some strange way, its flexibility might turn out to be a strength, as perhaps the “community” will determine its ultimate direction.

But why didn’t they pick a more appropriate name? WTF were they thinking?

Additional reading: Technorati: WTF, (humorous take)