Cartoonist, Hugh McLeod of gapingvoid nicely sums up the history of most blogs (including mine) in the following cartoon:

Now that the whole ‘Web 2.0′ fad is dying down a bit now, I find sites like TechCrunch much less interesting. I’m bored of hearing about all the new startups/mashups/acquisitions/Google-killers/YouTube-killers/<insert well known site name here>-killers.

I came across this link from the GigaOM site this morning with details on Yahoo’s new travel site. I’ve seen a couple of these sites before but as this integrates nicely with my Flickr account, I’m quite looking forward to making use of it on my upcoming trip to London and Amsterdam.

So I’ve set up a trip and will modify it over the next week or so with my schedule: http://travel.yahoo.com/trip?pid=706739&action=view

Update: TechCrunch have also just covered the new, Yahoo site too.

Interesting controversy stirring up at the moment is how eBay have banned their sellers from using Google Checkout. Their excuse is that it’s an untested and potentially unsafe product, but Google have a long history of making/receiving payments with their Adsense products and more recently their video portal. Populary opinon is that eBay is afraid of the competition that Google Checkout gives eBay’s own payment system, PayPal. This is despite the obvious fact that Google Checkout and PayPal are very different products, althoguh their is a bit of overlap.

eBay also recently banned RapLeaf which provides a commenting and rating system for buyers and sellers on ecommerce sites. Again, the popular opinon was that eBay banned it because it competed with their own rating systems which is just ridiculous.

Plaxo have made a couple of high visibility blog posts today saying that they are restricting the amount of automatic emails (a.k.a. SPAM) get sent out by users of their service. This seems like a good thing but it’s the way that they went about it that is leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths.

A summary of Todd Masonis’s post today reveals the following facts:

• Plaxo have known for a long time that they were spamming people
• But it’s OK – they were only spamming people to build up their customer base
• Now that they have enough customers, they’ll stop spamming you
• They also want to be good net-citizens, that’s their other reason for stopping the spam
• If you had joined Plaxo sooner, they would have stopped spamming you
• And by the way, it wasn’t Plaxo spamming you – it was their customers.
• (Did I mention that they’re not sorry about it either?)

I’ve been using the Plaxo service for the last couple of years and have unintentionally spammed my entire address book a couple of times, and have been flamed for it too. Especially from the people that I have no reason to stay in contact with! Plaxo have always made it too easy to spam your address book – I have never seen a warning message pop up that says: “You are about to send out hundreds of emails – are you sure you want to do this?”

But moving on, they say they are going to stop the spam and that’s a good thing. Apart from that, Ive always enjoyed using their service – it works great for keeping your Outlook data synchronised between multiple computers or profiles. Let’s hope that Plaxo hasn’t caused too much of a bad name for itself among the influentials.

UPDATE: Plaxo have now made a public apology, see my post here.