My wife was poking around on YouTube and found two videos she wanted to show me. The first was a music video from a band called okgo where they dance on treadmills. Interesting for about 60 seconds. Unfortunately, the video is three minutes long. Still, it is currently #8 on YouTube’s Most Watched All Time list. The other was a much funnier video called Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV (sung to the tune of Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree). The song is by the Asylum Street Spankers and the video was produced by Devil’s Night Productions.

Among Devil’s Night’s other work is an almost unknown movie called Matters of Consequence that stared Morty Coyle. Morty fronts a band called All Day Sucker, which was born out of the ashes of a band called THE iMPOSTERS. Back when I lived in LA, I used to go see THE iMPOSTERS pretty much whenever they played. This must have been the second half of 1996, when I was dealing with a massively broken heart. They had a regular gig every week, though I forget the name of the place. But I was there, pretty much every week. I used to carry Morty around the club on my shoulders during the harmonica solo of Rational Anthem. Wow, was that really 10 years ago?

Anyway, you check out a few songs from of All Day Sucker on their MySpace page. Some of the songs – Heavy Weather and Rub It In – date back to the iMPOSTERS days. Their album is available from CD Baby and from Zune, Rhapsody and iTunes. (No direct link for artists on Zune?) Check them out.

It’s amazing how small the world seems when you run across old friends online like this. Especially when the recent wind storm and power outage two weeks ago served as such a rude reminder of just how big the world really is, regardless of how it seems.

Seven months and one job ago, I wrote this about AJAX toolkits:

The network effect that Dion doesn’t consider is the component ecosystem phenomenon that Microsoft has a ton of experience with. Old school VB, COM/ActiveX and .NET have all had large ecosystems of components and controls evolve that extend the functionality of the baseline development platform. There’s no reason to believe that won’t happen with Atlas. I think it’s wrong to describe Atlas as a monolith or self-contained or enclosing. It’s an extensible baseline platform – i.e. the baseline functionality is set down once at the development platform and the ecosystem can extend it from there. Sure, overlapping extensions happen (how many rich text editor components are there for ASP.NET?) but at least they all have basic compatibility.

I bring this up now because I saw on Shawn Burke’s blog that they’ve shipped the September release of the Atlas Control Toolkit. There are now 25 different controls (they had 10 in their first release). But there’s something more significant than the addition of 15 controls overall:

Slider is just a super-useful little control.  There are so many times when you want to let users use this type of UI.  Another great thing about Slider is that it’s a 3rd party contribution, from Garbin, who did a great job on it. (emphasis added)
[Atlas Control Toolkit September Release]

I just wanted to brag that I called this 7 months ago.

Ron just posted his latest ARCast featuring yours truly talking about Enterprise 2.0. Some of the same stuff I blogged about last month, but in a conversational style. Check it out.

Mike just posted a list of sites he was using in a presentation. I had never seen Spell with Flickr before. Silly, but cool.

Here’s DevHawk spelled with Flickr.

One of the topics that comes up regularly in the context of Web 2.0 is the idea that social software gets better the more people use it. Tim O’Reilly wrote about it when describing Web 2.0 and brought it up when he was on stage with Bill Gates at MIX06.

Tim called it a principle of Web 2.0. But I don’t think getting better with use is exclusive to social software. Alan Cooper wrote about building software that learns how the user works and optimizes itself for that usage pattern. For example, Windows Vista has a new feature called SuperFetch that “understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive when you first boot or when you switch to a different user profile.”

The big difference that I see is that personal software has to be designed to learn where social software automatically improves with use.