I think this post by Brian at Zaadz encapsulates what a lot of us are hoping for, in terms of a next generation, conscious, connected, internet.

It certainly tracks with some of the "future-gazing", I've been spouting off here., but of course, more down to earth, and  more experience with "social networks".

Rating systems

Skillful Means

Portfolio analysis

Great to see someone running with the ball!

Is called Podbop. 

From the description:

"We podcast bands coming to your town"

Now you can LISTEN to bands that are coming to town, see if you like the voice, like the music. NOTE:  The pages are slow to load, but well worth it.

Here is the San Francisco page.


Seriously, this is a long standing problem of mine.  There is a free evening, I want to go out and here music I haven't heard - but how do you know it isn't crap?  Now you can preview! 

Now there only needs to be MORE bands listed.

I've already lined up a couple of bands I want to see.  I'll report on the results next week.

For those who have a site, and aren't using it, I wanted to make sure to recommend the Site Meter, Counter and Statistics Tracker, for tracking how much traffic you are getting on your site.

First, it is free. 
Second, it is unobtrusive on your site. 
Third, it is one of the most used tracking systems, and it is what is used by the largest sites - such as DailyKos, Gizmodo, etc.

Take a look at the above links, you also get hourly, daily, weekly, and yearly views. Very nice.

I currently have three systems that I see views on, that I check weekly.  One is what is built-in to blogware, the blog provider I use. The second is Blogpatrol , which is down every other week, and when you use it, always pops up an advertising window - and then Sitemeter.

Sitemeter has been the most transparent, fastest, and most consistent, by a long shot. 

Sitemeter is also very good at discounting the traffic from spammers, and only getting "live bodies" - which is one of the issues with blogware. (According to blogware, this site gets an amazing amount of traffic - but it includes various spamblogs, without breaking them out.)

It's possible that sitemeter doesn't contain traffic from RSS feeds - which blogware claims it does - but again, without a breakout of "real" feeds from spam feeds, it's hard to say.

At any rate, for those who are interested in such things - definitely add Sitemeter as your counter!

I've been noticing the integration on gmail, of both Gtalk's chat, with the search and archiving abilities of google.

It's actually a pretty cool setup.  But the best review of the new integration, and suggestions of how best to use it, is at the Unofficial Google Weblog.

The three main ways of communicating with someone - email, Instant Message, and Talking - are now provided through the same interface.  That's pretty cool!

NOTE:  This is probably going to be a tech enthusiast day, for posting...

Actually, what got me to join is I wanted to respond back to Aaron - the CEO - when talking about interoperability between different social networking sites. And the way I could respond is by registering!

The conversation is here.

It's actually pretty cool that these types of conversations are encouraged by Aaron, and he is so responsive.  I don't spend nearly as much time around Integral Naked as I want to, because I prefer transparent blogging conversations to Forums (really forums are just as good, that's just my own personal preference.  I have the same issue with Yahoo Groups.)

While again, this particular social network doesn't have all the best functionality (Barnraiser and Elgg are ones that I like, because of features and that they are open source), seems to have the:

Right energy
Right attitude
Right skillz
Good structure

So let's see what happens!

Also - big thanks to Ryan for the warm welcome.