The mysterious jphantom has a very simple but good web app to test your typing speed. Check it out here. My results are below. Anyone want to challenge me?

Non-technology blogs will experience their biggest year of growth yet. Both readers and writers are participating more in the blog community. It is now easier than ever to start up a blog. The word blog is becoming mainstream, and the general public is becoming more aware of what a blog is and how they can interact with them. Technorati claims that there are 175,000 new blogs created every day. This number seems pretty high to me (it adds up to 63 million a year), but nonetheless, the blog community is rapidly growing.

2008 will be a breakthrough year for RSS advertising. With the inclusion of RSS readers built into most browsers, people who don’t even know what a feed is are subscribing to feeds. Also, ads do much better when they are fed to a less tech-savy audience.

eBay’s downfall will continue. eBay used to be the goto site when selling or buying an item online. Currently, with the abundance of scams, I feel that eBay is hardly worth the hastle. Here is a great example of one of the problems with eBay. Right now, if I was going to sell an item, Craigslist would be my first option.

Google will be THE website for one stop shopping. Personally I have used google search and mail for a long time and have started to use reader, bookmarks and most recently gears, within the last year. Originally, google competed against all in one portals like yahoo by offering superior search results. Now, they are one themselves but have added more features than any of its competitors, while still having better search results.

Just a quick note….I was just going through my blog stats and noticed several searches consisting of URLs bringing traffic to this blog. Most of them were to post pages and the URL is relatively long, and therefore must have been copied. Why are people pasting URLs into google instead of pasting them into the address bar? I don’t get it.

My most anticipated product of 2008 is the smartpen: Livescribe . I first read about this over at portable gadget. It is due to be out in Q1 of 2008 and is expected to be priced at under $200. Livescribe looks to capture a market where Logitech and others have done poorly. Beyond capturing written text, the Livescribe has a microphone to record audio. It is rumored to hold 100 hours of audio. It uses dot paper, which can be purchased from Livescribe, or printed out at home. There is also a software devolopment kit available which will hopefully create some good 3rd party apps.

On paper, this sounds like the perfect gadget for a university student. To have the audio and the content of a lecture unified, in a digital format would be invaluable. Written notes are synchronized with audio, allowing the audio playback of the moment specific notes were written. This feature could be useful, as listening to whole lectures is pretty boring.

Hopefully, this pen will turn the tides on the underachieving market of smarpens. Livescribe has huge potential in a market where none of the available products have lived up to expectations yet. I have always thought that spartpens would be useful, but the ones that are currently available are not yet satisfactory. Hopefully, Livescribe will fill the void in the smartpen market, thus making it my most anticipated product of 2008.

Here is some related chatter: Official Livescribe Blog, gizmodo, wikipedia.

I have spent years crawling the web for the best Christmas displays so you don’t have to. Here are the 10 best displays that I have come across.

Note: ‘Excessive’ has no negative connotations.

10. Just barely making it onto the list is an automated display timed to the peanuts theme. Link to Youtube.

9. controltheshow.com offers a unique experience where the user gets complete control over christmas lights that are viewable via a webcam. There is a queue system where the user gets sole control over the lights for a minute.

8. An automated light display of the song Carol of the Bells is one of the better ones around and made it into this list.

7. These aren’t a light displays, or even displays at all, but they are just sooo awesome that I had to put them in here. gotchabox.com has some hilarious fake product boxes (eg. a 28 piece wisk set) to put real presents in. Too bad it’s too late to order these for Christmas.

6. Here is another automated Christmas light display to the Trans Siberian Orchestra’s the Nutcracker.

5. Kipkay has recently posted an easy Christmas Light hack that anyone could easily do. This video explains how to hook up a set of Christmas light to a stereo and blink in time with the music.

4. Automated Christmas Bells playing the Super Mario theme are pretty difficult to make, but would be good for impressing the ladies. The producer briefly explains how he made the bells here.

3. I don’t like techno (or Christmas music either), but this display plays in time to Da Rude’s Sandstorm.

2. Alek has offered his amazing light display for the public to control. He is doing this all for Celiac Disease (you can donate on his website). There is quite a bit of traffic on this site, so the lights don’t always respond to input. This display started of as a hoax, but probably isn’t now. The Musem of Hoaxes covers this here.

1. It was a close battle between first and second, but the original viral Christmas lights movie has prevailed. It is done to the song ‘Wizards of Winter’. This video has also been rumored to be a hoax, but Snopes debunked that here.

Yes, it is family tech support season again. If you know how to install Firefox, you are regarded as a technological god and are automatically recruited to fix anything that contains a transistor. Now back at home for Christmas, geeks are recruited to fix aging computers and setup new ones.

I was going to write more about this but I found that many people have already covered this.

Here is the list:

• Russell Beattie rounds up the difficulties of guiding a user through Vista over the phone.
• Here is an excellent Slashdot thread of the “Tech Support Generation”
• Dale Tudge’s article ‘Becoming The Family Tech Support Guru‘ shows how “you’ll be the family’s F1 key if they find out that you know everything about computers”.
• ‘The Computer Geeks Who Saved Christmas‘ from the Washington Post outlines an engineer who’s “got stuck with the job of being his family’s fix-it guy because he is an engineer who works on mainframe supercomputers…[which] does not have a lot in common with the typical $500 Dell laptop, but his family members seem to think his day job should make removing pesky computer viruses and spyware a snap.”

• cnet has a simple guide on providing family tech support.

That’s right, this blog is now for sale. Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities Weblog has a tool for estimating the value of blogs. It uses a ratio between the number of links and the dollar value. It isn’t accurate at all, but it provides a bit of cheap entertainment. Click on the link in the widget to find out how much your blog is worth.

This one came in at just under $4000. I am open to any reasonable offers and accept paypal, cash, gadgets or even beer.

I have been aware of creationist museums existing in the states, which is scary but it doesn’t surprise me. Before today, I did not know that 28 exist worldwide, including 2 in Canada. Wikipedia has a list of them here.

In Alberta, the Texas of Canada, The Big Valley Creation Science Museum has recently opened its doors. They have displays set up just like a real museum and offer scientific evidence for creationism. I suggest you check their site out; it’s worth it for a good laugh.

Here is a selection of their evidence displays:

• “the fossil sequence and profound evidence for a past, global flood”
• a “Terrible Lizards” display
• My favorite is the “Age of the Earth” display that houses an example of a fossilized teddy bear and a fossilized human foot in a cowboy boot.

Ian Juby, an associate of the museum, says “Basically, we are pointing out that scientifically speaking, there is a lot of good evidence putting to a supernatural creation.” Yes, you did read that correctly. He used scientifically and supernatural in the same sentence.

Another quote, from a creationist museum display (via JacksRealm) says “According to God’s word, thorns came after Adam’s sin, about 6000 years ago, not millions of years ago. Since we have discovered thorns in the fossil record, along with dinosaurs and other plants and animals, they all must have lived at the same time as humans, after Adam’s sin.”

I think that I need to plan a road trip here just to see it for myself.

PS check out John Scalzi’s Creationist Museum Report. The laughs never end.