When U2 first started, the leader singer (whose real name was Paul Hewson) originally went by the name "Bono Vox." Later he shortened it to "Bono" and the rest, as they say, is history.

Hmmm... a chance to show off the new audio features?

Except you can't insert assets from the QotD field on the Comet home page, thus necessitating a cumbersome double edit.

Here are some of mine:

And yet more:

It would be nice if Comet could play a grouping or collection of mp3s as a playlist.

now that you can post mp3s. Renders all previously features comletely irrelevant.

Some more recent songs of note. I wish my mp3 files had album covers embedded in them, but that's not something that iTunes seems to do.

Built To Spill: "Conventional Wisdom"

So kickass.

Ars Technica is reporting that Word 2007 is going to feature integrated blogging . Microsoft Word is legendary for producing for inefficient and ugly html, but it seems that maybe they've fixed that, according to the lead engineer (with the oddly disturbing name of "Joe Friend") on the project on a post from his blog :

The goal for this feature is not pure fidelity, but the right fidelity for your blog. The HTML for this post was created by Word. Go ahead, click View, Source in your browser and look at the HTML starting with "Word is a great tool..." We really are going pretty basic here. Bold become <strong>, Italic becomes <em>, Heading 1 become <h1>, Quotes become <blockquote> and on it goes. There are definitely kinks in Beta 2. For example we are encoding smart quotes incorrectly so I had to turn off that feature in Word, but the goal is to output just what is needed to make your blog post clean and readable (code and rendered HTML).

Here's a screenshot, from the Microsoft guy's blog posting:

Here is the new blog account dialog, which giznankerously doesn't mention Typepad:

When I was blogging a lot to Typepad I used Word a lot, because it felt safer (no chance of browser giznank losing a long post) and because I am very used to editing text in Word. In Comet, I do actually compose using the rtf editor-because it's cooler, and there's a post recovery feature (which is huge) and the easy integration of assets.

That being said, I would actually be tempted to use this Word 2007 blogging feature if:

• it ends up in the Mac version of Office
• it supported Typepad (or Comet)

Those are both big ifs, of course. This seems like something worth keeping an eye on. Maybe someone should evangelize him to support 6A products as well?

I just visited a bunch of my posts and looked to see what Google ads would appear. They did seem to be displaying based on the content of my posts (like TV, or Veronica Mars, or music) so that's good.

Now we just sit back and start collecting checks. Oh yeah, suckle on google's money teat.

Something to keep an eye in regards to Comet-the government may soon mandate restrictions on social networking sites due to the problem of kids getting preyed on by unscrupulous employees from the Department of Homeland Security. In this CNN article, the Attorney General of Massachusetts says he wants:

...MySpace to install an age and identity verification system, equip Web pages with a "Report Inappropriate Content" link, respond to all reports of inappropriate content within 24 hours and significantly raise the number of staff who review images and content.

Yeah... that'll work with teenagers... written warnings... yeah. Has this guy ever met a teenager? Teenagers are programmed, at a deep biological level, not to tell adults anything... ever. It's a hard-coded defense that keeps our species safe, bcause it allows our society to evolve at a faster rate than it would otherwise. Parents, the next time your teenager lies and deceives you, remember that.

This is basically political grandstanding, but there's probably some reasonable things that sites like Comet should be doing to protect kids. Age verification is one of them, because it's basically bad for a community if people can say they're something they're not, unless the communitiy as a whole decides and understands that role-playing like that is okay. A community where some people are what they say they are, but others are not (and do it with bad intentions) is a community that's getting poisoned and in the long run won't survive.

in Comet? Until recently I didn't realize that you could "connect" to someone in Comet, but not be their friend or family. I think this concept makes sense, but what does it actually do for me, the user? Making someone a friend or family means that I can make my posts visible only to them, which makes sense. But I can't make a post "contact" only. So if I make someone a "contact" all it really means is that they show up on my "Connect" page. I guess they would also show up in my "neighbhorhood" and I would see their recent posts on my My Comet page. The concept, and the nomenclature, are confusing to me, though. Friends and family seem like types of contacts to me, but really, contacts, friends and family are all types of people you can be connected to on Comet.

It seems like when you connect to someone on Comet, you should be asked to classify the connection as one of three possible things:

i) family
ii) friend
iii) contact (business associate or someone you've just met on Comet)

Right now the ui uses checkboxes, which is just wrong. Something I've always to try and just did, is to add someone as both a friend and a family member. You can do that, which makes no sense to me. The way it should work, IMHO, is to have a drop-down menu with the three options above. That seems much clearer. Dividing the world into family, friends and other people whom you have some connection to but are "close" with seems much closer to the way human beings actually classify people in their minds.

I'm going to rewrite this and submit it to "Feedback" too but I thought I would throw it out to the Comet community at large for discussion too, since Feedback tends to feel like a black box.

Has been since about 9:30pm last night. By "Comet home page" I mean the page you get when click on the Comet logo, or on the Comet link in the light blue navbar. This page:

http://www.notcomet.com/home

When I go there, I get the nav at the top, as well as the footer, but where there should be content, I just get the "oops" message:

Anyone else having problems with this page? I sent a bug report to "Feedback" last night but haven't heard back from them. Perhaps it will be fixed in the bugfix version (0.41?) that's supposed to come out today.

Suddenly Comet was breaking right and left, an event unprecedented in my experience so far in the alpha-test. It seems, though, that it was a new version being rolled out. I see a new (giznankerosly Windows XP only) photo upload tool link, and a vertical image to the left asking me if I've posted from my phone lately. The answer to that, sadly, is no, since my cel phone sucks ass. However, contratulations to the Comet team on the 0.3 release.

Edit: this is actually the 0.4 release. Sorry about that.