I’ve been shopping at Amazon.com for years, and have occasionally found the service’s product recommendations useful. But over time, as the store has become larger and its inventory more diverse, it’s become harder for those stressed algorithms to come up with truly useful recommendations. For me, this reached its apotheosis with the recommendation above, suggesting that I get some accessories for a recently purchased HDMI cable. The proposed accessories? More HDMI cables! I guess they could keep each other company. Or perhaps it’s part of a scheme by an alien species, a la “Or All The Seas With Oysters.” Not sure what the offspring of two HDMI cables would be; maybe a DRM-enabled, 1080p-capable coat hanger. Or bicycle.

The idea of ringxiety—those phantom cellphone rings and vibrations that you sometimes think you hear or feel, even when you’ve left your phone at home—has been around for a couple of years, with various theories floated about the phenomenon’s root cause. ?I think the phantom ring can all be tied into your love life or lack thereof,? one sufferer opined a couple of years ago. The latest explanation, however, is downright creepy. In an NPR segment earlier this week, one expert mentioned the oft-repeated idea that users think of cellphones as phantom limbs as an actual cause for the condition, suggesting that the brain can actually become convinced that a cellphone—especially one carried regularly in the same location— is a physical limb. The solution: move the phone to another spot before your brain gets confused. And change your ringtone regularly to avoid having it hard-wired into your consciousness as a comforting sound. Personally, I’d prefer to just leave the phone at home, but since I can’t do that, maybe I’ll try to find the most annoying ringtone I can, and stash the phone in a bag. Then again, if I’ve already reached the phantom limb stage, that won’t help much. And, besides—oops, gotta run. My leg is vibrating.

I’ve been using gadgets, widgets and gizmos on my computers for as long as I can remember. Even before tools like Apple’s Dashboard and Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets, there were programs that let you put the weather, calendar and annoying eyeballs in your taskbar. And, of course, before that, there were TSRs, those memory-resident programs that, in the pre-multitasking, MS-DOS era, allowed you to bring up an ASCII chart or notepad with a mere flick of a keystroke. Over time, as widgets have become more common, they’ve also, I believe, become less useful, in relative terms. Today’s widgets have enormous potential to serve as a control panel for your life, but they’re hampered by business models and a lack of easy portability. So, if you want to use Google Desktop Sidebar and include your buddy list in the panel, you’d better be using Google Talk. True, browser-based platforms like Netvibes work better, but that sort of defeats the whole idea of widgets as standalone, always-active tools.

That’s why I’m excited about the potential of Chumby, the dedicated widget device that’s finally on sale after over a year of hype. Chumby is essentially a hardware version of Windows Vista’s SideShow feature—without Vista or any proprietary software, or even the need for a computer. You can put a Chumby on your nightstand and use it as an Internet-enabled clock radio (at this point, I’m only assuming the radio part; if this doesn’t support Internet radio and UPnP all bets are off). Or put it on your desktop as an email station. The options are limited only by what developers come up with, and it won’t take too many applications to make Chumby indispensable (at least for the geek class). I don’t expect Chumby to ever become mainstream. But it does herald a future of non-PC, always-connected, software-defined devices. I could easily see putting one of these in every room in my home, but at $175 each that’s a bit prohibitive, so I’ll settle for one in the kitchen or bedroom, and await the revolution for the bathroom model.

I’ve always been at least a little dubious of Nicholas Negroponte’s plan to distribute low-cost laptops to the children of the developing world. I don’t doubt Negroponte’s sincerity; I think he really does believe he’s on a mission to help educate the huddled masses and bridge the global digital divide. However, the idea that technology can educate students in and of itself is a controversial one, and it’s been argued more than once that what these students really need are more teachers, classrooms and books; the basics of education, rather than the trappings of technology. As fellow Engadget alum Cyrus Farivar points out:

Negroponte’s plan to heal the world with laptops is well-meaning but fundamentally flawed. What good is a laptop in the middle of rural Thailand when electricity, much less Internet access, are spotty at best? Rather than getting laptops into the hands of every schoolchild across the world, why not start with an intermediate step? Probably because One Blackboard per Child or One Teacher per Classroom just doesn’t sound as sexy.

Then, of course, there’s the issue of money. It’s a finite resource, and for every $200 spent buying a laptop for a child, that’s $200 that can’t be spent on food, potable water or medicines. While other high-profile projects designed to help the developing world aren’t without their flaws (Bono’s Red, accused of having too-high administrative costs, comes to mind), they at least focus on the basics of food, shelter and health. That said, I’m willing to give Negroponte the benefit of the doubt—and $400 of my money, so I can buy one laptop for the developing world and one for myself. If his project flops, I’ll still have my laptop, which will either end up as a collector’s item or eBay detrius. While I’m at it, though, I’ll go ahead and send Oxfam a few bucks as well. My money’s as finite as anyone’s, but I’m not willing to make this a zero-sum game.

As a former employee, sometime source and Type 1 shooter, I’m a little disappointed that AOL has killed the Weblogs Inc. Diabetes Blog. While I have no doubt that the shuttering was done for purely economic reasons, I can’t help but think that the blog could have thrived with a little more effort. After all, as AOL founder Steve Case knows, health is one of the hottest areas on the web. The good news is that, while AOL may not have any idea how to serve/make money from the db community, others have stepped in to fill the gap. In the past couple of weeks alone, new blogs were launched by diabetes megasite dLife and the nonprofit American Association of Diabetes Educators. So, yeah, I’m sorry to see The Diabetes Blog go. But I won’t miss it a whole lot, given the plethora of other resources out there.

On a recent trip to Canada, I made sure to stay in a hotel with free in-room WiFi. This meant that, in addition to the obvious things like being able to check email and news from my room, I could also save on the usual extortionate hotel long distance charges by using Skype, and listen to music via Rhapsody. The former worked like a charm. Unfortunately, when I tried logging in to my Rhapsody Unlimited account, I came up against one of the service’s limits: No access outside of the U.S. After some initial frustration, I decided to try the favored solution of government spooks and Chinese dissidents: Anonymizer. After downloading the latest version and signing up for a free seven-day trial, I rebooted, and activated anonymous surfing. I checked my IP address, and sure enough, the hotel’s Canadian address had been replaced with an American one supplied by Anonmyizer. I logged back into Rhapsody, and was streaming my library within minutes. Although Anonymizer slowed down my access slightly, the lag was minimal, and didn’t affect my ability to stream from Rhapsody. Overall, it was a very satisfying experience, and I’d be happy to pay Anonymizer’s annual fee just to avoid similar hassles in the future (though of course, it would be even better if Rhapsody Unlimited really lived up to its name).

The latest in my series mourning failed business models.

Remember back in the bubble era, when online greeting cards looked ready to make their paper cousins irrelevant, much as email had killed personal letters? Dancing, singing, tacky, tasteless ecards were so hot that zero-revenue startup BlueMountain.com sold for $780 million, all on the strength of its brand of ugly, annoying cards. Of course, when the bubble burst, buyer Excite unloaded the business for about $35 million. But the bubble isn’t what’s killing the ecard business today. In fact, post-bubble, ecards have continued to, well, bubble along. I still get a couple now and again from relatives who’ve missed the deadline to send a postal greeting. And many of today’s models are a vast improvement over the MIDI-laced, animated-GIF based cards of the 90s. So, why is the ecard era about to end? One word: Spam. As Bob Sullivan points out in a recent post:

Would-be spammers first send out fake greeting cards, which trick recipients into visiting Web pages that are booby-trapped with malicious software that allows visitors’ computers to be hijacked. Then those hijacked computers are turned into spam machines, and directed to send out attachment spam. The two-stage attacks are very effective.

So many fake greeting cards have flooded the Net that Sullivan is even recommending a blanket ban: “Don’t ever read electronic greeting cards. They have officially become more trouble than they are worth. If you think one might be authentic, and you just can’t resist, call the sender before opening it to make sure the card is real.” Sure, can you imagine that? “Hi, Uncle Joe. Did you really send me this ecard? Oh, and by the way, next time can you just send cash?”

While the spam-powered destruction of the ecard business may not bring tears to too many eyes (BlueMountain.com’s current owner, American Greetings, still makes its real money from paper cards), the broader implications aren’t pretty. After all, if spammers can bring down one industry so easily, what’s to stop them from doing the same by mimicking other online services? Indeed, as Sullivan points out, they’ve already moved on to sending PDF attachments. Will Adobe’s venerable format become the next victim? Or will email providers finally get serious about fighting spam and recognize that it’s not just a threat to BlueMountain or Adobe—it’s their business that’s on the line if they can’t find a way to beat the spammers.

Having lived through the first Internet bubble (without, alas, getting rich), I’ve been following all the “Bubble 2.0” talk over the past couple of years with some bemusement. After all, unlike the first bubble, we haven’t seen companies go public and watch their stocks soar to stratospheric heights not justified by their earnings (unless you count Google, that is, but they do actually make money). If this is a bubble, it’s a much more modest one, where a successful entrepreneur can cash out for $35 million, rather than the $350 million he might have made in a Bubble 1.0 IPO. And other exit strategies are even more modest; some companies have even sold themselves via eBay for a mere six figures. However, VMWare’s IPO earlier this week might just put the bounce in Bubble 2.0. The EMC subsidiary, which makes the eponymous virtualization software closed at $51 from a $29 open in its first day of trading, and shot up another 13% to $57 on day two. It’s enough to remind me of the early days of trading in Yahoo and Netscape, when I though those companies were overvalued at about $33 (silly, silly me!). So, is the company worth its current valuation of over $20 billion? Beats me. The company does have revenue—of close to $1 billion a year—which sets it apart from much of the Bubble 1.0 crowd. And the company makes some great software. But its business is threatened at least in part by Microsoft, which has limited virtualization under Vista’s EULA. And it faces a raft of competitors from giants like Citrix to credible players like SWSoft. Regardless, this IPO may well open the floodgates for a raft of new offerings. And maybe this time, I’ll be a little less circumspect about those first-day gains, and put a little of my own cash on the line. Maybe.

The much-ballyhooed people-centric search engine Spock just launched, and I’ve checked it out in the obvious way: with an ego-search. And, man, am I disappointed. While I could live with being in 5th or 6th place, a search for perton came up blank! Well, not blank blank. But I wasn’t there, which in ego-surfing terms is about the same thing. Victor grabbed the top two spots, and some of the others were filled out with dudes from the village. So, as far as I’m concerned, Spock is ready for the Vulcan death grip. Though I do have to give them kudos for including Uncle Marvin!

While some may gloat about the apparent demise of the fee-based TimesSelect service, I see no reason to celebrate the service’s inability to bring in enough subscribers to justify its continued use of a subscription business model.

The simple fact is that there really is (almost) no such thing as free content. Someone is always paying, whether it’s the subscriber handing over a credit card number, the advertiser looking to catch eyeballs, or a combination of the two. And there’s really nothing wrong with that. It costs money to create content, and even the smallest of publishers need to find ways to cover their costs. Sure, there are cases (like yours truly) where the information is essentially free (yeah, I’ve got some PPC ads on here, but I haven’t even earned a buck on them), but personal blogs (and Wikipedia) aside, most info on the web is paid content. Of the top 100 blogs on Technorati, for example, only a handful are ad-free (the leader is PostSecret, which, fittingly, bills itself as “the largest advertisement-free Blog on the web”).

While TimesSelect may not have worked out as a pay service, it doesn’t mean information “wants to be free” or that the Times is going to stop trying to make money online. It just means the numbers for a free, ad-supported site were more favorable than those for a subscriber-based version. For others (like my employer), a subscriber-based model works very well. Either way, somebody is paying, and if that ever stops, information won’t be free; it just won’t be.