The Progress Bar

Amazing video of a Brazilian soccer star.

Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb is done calling it web2.0. Good for him. Glad to see the hype dying down a bit. The whole web 2.0 moniker was kind of embarrassing and besides about 500 people, nobody knew what we were talking about. I’m always surprised at while we passed the 1 billion internet user mark this year, it’s still generally the same handful of people from 5 years ago that are the most involved with pushing the web forward.

I like the reference to the nuclear winter, that’s just what it felt like. Innovation ceased in most internet sectors and everyone went home when there wasn’t easy money for their new groundbreaking web-based calendar.

The problem with many web 2.0 ideas is that they do in fact suck, big time. Anyone more than 50 miles from San Francisco not pulled into the Valley reality distortion field knows that.

The web is more exciting these days, but just barely. Flickr is fun, and there are a few others that rely on recommendation engines that look promising, mostly in the music space. Social bookmarks do little for me, Google still rules, although seeing what other people are bookmarking (when it’s embedded in their blogroll) is somewhat useful.

Open profiles, persistent portable credentials, context-sensitive communication and everything is an RSS feed. That’s 2006 in my mind. If you’re not working hard on these things, you’re just building another web calendar app.

Answers for intermittent wifi signal droppage on Tiger.

Flickr photos of classic punks. Clash, The Jam, Sex Pistols, great stuff.

Other Music is a great music store in New York City. The end of year recap is a yearly read for me.

A while back I signed up for Chemistry.com. Because it was a geographicaly-limited beta, I had to use a zip code that would let me appear as if I lived in Denver.

Today, I received An Exclusive Offer for Current Match.com Subscribers to reserve a free lifetime charter membership to Chemistry. The caveat being that “As a lifetime charter member, you are invited to use Chemistry at no charge for as long as your Match.com subscription is active and in good standing.”

I follow the link to the site, and attempted to create a new account. The signup process failed. I called the 866 number to see what the deal was. Turns out that the email was sent out a while ago, and the cutoff date to respond was December 1. Why did I receive the offer email today? Something is b0rked with their email system.

I can’t log in with my old account, and I can’t create a new one. I feel special.

The call center person had an email address unassociated with match.com, supposed to get back to me by the end of the day. We’ll see about that.

Chemistry, fix the tab order in the login page. It goes from First Name to password to Login name to Confirm password, so you end retyping your password in the login field. Jakob Nielsen would not be pleased.

Feedburner, the service that manages my RSS feeds, continues to roll out new services. The latest is FeedFlare. If all goes according to plan, subscribers to my blog will see enhanced meta-data (information about that individual post) at the bottom of each entry in their RSS newsreader.

This is funny. An RSS reader for the bathroom.

My evening has been spent researching headphones and microphones so I can do some serious podcasting. Getting up to speed on headphones was overwhelming, until I found HeadRoom and this headphone review at Ars Technica. After looking at countless review sites, I’ve come to realize that I don’t trust CNET reviews at all. Not a dig against CNET, they review thousands of items each year, it just pays to find reviews done by people who are passionate about products and services and not reviewing something on their lunch hour. After much deliberation, I decided on a pair of Sennheiser HD 555′s. Next up, which microphone?