I don't own a Kindle, but I would surely like to. I am the type of person that owns shelves of books. Many of them are reference books. I like to be able to find knowledge and I like to have it at my fingertips. The internet is a great resource for that (although caution is recommended). I would love to be able to carry a library around in my satchel. It would be nice to be able to grab a newspaper or blog wherever I am and read it, too. A number of obstacles has always prevented ebook readers from success. One is that people don't like reading lots of content on screens. Another is the availability of materials in the device format can be a problem. Amazon has seemingly addressed both of those concerns. The Kindle screen is supposedly very reader friendly. And the volume of titles Amazon can make available to the reader is something they should have no problem providing. Amazon has already started to digitize many of the books they make available for purchase on their site. This is merely another step in that direction. [read more...]

Ajaxian listed Songza song search service today. I did a search on "Stairway to Heaven." Of course Led Zepplin does it. I listened to it first. Then a Frank Zappa live version in Cleveland in 1988. Also Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck guitar duo of it (very nice). The O'Jays, Rodrigio y Gabriela, Stanley Jordan? Songza will certianly find and play the song you are looking for. It even has "Stairway to Heaven Lyrics backward for those searching for the demon in the machine. [read more...]

Sort of an unusual name, but nevertheless, Symbabloo is a nice concept. It is a new bookmarking type of site. If you use a set of webtools and they are pretty much defined, this could become your landing page. I haven't made it my home page yet, but it is vying for that honor as a nice webtool launcher.

I stumbled across the very cool find feature in Safari 3.0. If you haven't tried it yet, try navigating to a page, then do a command-F (on mac, cntrl on pc). A find navigation bar will appear at the top of your page. Type in the word you are looking for on the page. The screen grays out and the found words highlight as you type. The first found word on the page is highlighted in orange. if you click the next or back buttons in the find navigation bar the next or previous word will highlight in orange. This is a really nice touch of the user interface.