Last week, Amazon.com announced its newest big venture, the Amazon Kindle. It seems to be the second major entry into the world of eBooks that are functional and will help develop this potential new market.

Right now, Facebook is probably the most successful and biggest hyped thing on the Internet. Most of it is for good reason, because many people, especially college students, have almost exclusively adopted it as their replacement to e-mail and Instant Messenger. With the release of powerful APIs to hook deeply into Facebook's site, some powerful applications (but mostly really annoying ones) have been created that leverage the social network of Facebook and integrate so well you don't even realize it's a program built on top of Facebook.

Some people believe that you should share the wireless signal with anyone, because Internet access should be free. I think that's a swell idea, but it doesn't work well in practice. I like having a secure network within our house because I like to share files and printers between computers. Those two goals don't work together well unless you get a router from FON.

I haven't tried it out myself yet, but this stuff just looks amazing. It seems to perform pretty well, too. Ext JS is a JavaScript library that can easily create some desktop-like window effects. A coworker was demoing it with a table of data and the JavaScript automatically sorted, he could CTRL-select items and you can even drag things around. It seems to be an great open-source application.

Not too long ago, a client at work was wondering what kind of options they could have for showing buddy icons in their blog comments. I looked around, but didn't really like any of the default plug-ins. Well, one struck my interest a bit, but the client wasn't looking for a third-party solution. What I found was Gravatar, a website that wants to host a visual identifier for you to be used anywhere online. It's a simple concept, but I was of course worried with setting up and managing another service, another plugin for my software, etc.

And people thought that Windows Vista took forever. About four years ago, I saw a green GoTo Card reader on a MetroTransit bus and asked a bus driver what that was. He said they were introducing a new kind of SuperSaver in time for the launch of the Hiawatha Light Rail line. Just this month, the GoTo Card has finally come out for public use, even though I've been using one for most of a year.

As Joe Bowar says about a household member, "You act as if Dan just joined your religion." That's not true. But it's pretty exciting.

Just in case you haven't heard, I today purchased a MacBook Pro. It's a first-time Mac purchase for me, but it's been a long time coming. We'll see how much I like it, but so far, it's been great.

With the Internet and the aggressive caching of data by almost everyone, it's hard to measure your visitors accurately. For example, Google may only check your feed once, but any number of people may be reading your site via Google Reader or iGoogle or other services.

As anyone who runs a website these days knows, spam on the internet is becoming more and more of a problem. It's hard to keep up with it on your own. That's why you don't do it on your own. Here are a couple free services to install on your website to keep the spam away.