If you've decided you want an iPhone, but Steve Jobs' minimalist aesthetics don't jive with yours, Colorware has come up with a solution. Click on over to the Colorware design studio, and for about 200 large more than a standard iPhone, you can get one in any variety of colors, from the blue/gold Cal Golden Bears-like mockup you see here, to cotton candy pink and lipstick red fusion.

It's funny that while I've already made my mind up to not get a 1st revision iPhone for 400 smackers, that slapping on a coat of paint and making it 600 almost seems worth it. And for my wife, if she's reading, no, I haven't purchased the blue and gold one, so please don't send me a flame e-mail...

A dozen or so days ago, I kicked off a discussion in the blogopshere around the practice of relying heavily on internal links, even when external links to the source of news would likely serve a reader better. A few weeks into it, the debate is still raging, not just here, but elsewhere.

Two well-respected bloggers, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research, formerly of PodTech, and Muhammad Saleem, have added their own comments. As you can expect, given that there seems to be no "one right answer" to this discussion, their findings are quite different.

Jeremiah, in a post titled "Linking Strategy and why Back Linking is OK", says, "If your content (on your own website) can add more value linking elsewhere, than it’s certainly ok to do this."

Muhammad, in a post titled "Do you link in or link out?", says, "By linking to other sources you can either use them to back up your own argument or provide your readers with another viewpoint to consider and come to their own conclusions."

To resummarize my comments from before, I have zero problems with referring to old notes on a similar topic. I do it all the time (as in my first link above). But if an external hyperlink would add more value, or lead a reader to the source of the story, that makes more sense than the growing practice of dumping visitors into a random archive page or keyword search results.

Additional comments since my last update can be found from Michael Coates, The Last Podcast, The Net Takeaway, and Daily Grumble.

Given the steady drip-drip sounds outside, thanks to an early Fall rainstorm moving through the Bay Area, it seems possible that Saturday won't feature the open sky sun we've become spoiled with every week. With Cal's impending 3:00 p.m. contest against Pac-10 foe Arizona looming Saturday, the prospect opens up that the game might be played in less than favorable conditions - with 50,000 or more fans dodging the elements, ourselves included.


Google's Weather Forecast for Berkeley this Weekend

With the young season three games old, Cal has achieved an impressive #6 national ranking in the AP poll, led only by USC, LSU, Florida, Oklahoma and West Virginia, schools better known for their year-in, year-out football prowess than Cal, despite a good run for my alma mater the last four years or so. And for those of us "Old Blues", who haven't historically demanded much from the school's athletic programs, we're certainly conflicted in how to feel - torn between thinking a national anti-Pac-10 bias doesn't give us the respect we deserve, and our own eyes deceiving us as we find fault with the team, be they "unimaginative on offense" or displaying a defense unable to shut down a good team.

Frankly said, we're not used to this kind of pressure. So used to seeing Cal fail when the big play is needed, or losing a big game, there's a certain part of us that is waiting for the inevitable slip-up, expecting the team to screw up, so we can then point fingers at our prior doubt and prove our unique insight.

In fact, the debate is raging on The Band is Out on the Field and Excuse Me for My Voice over whether the team's secondary or quarterback are up to the challenge of moving beyond their week one win against Tennessee and challenging the traditional leaders, or even taking on their Pac-10 colleagues. With USC looming in the distance, we're already watching the Oregon Ducks and how they've started out strong - and we all remember how Cal lost in the desert at Arizona last year, significantly damaging their Rose Bowl hopes.

That we're ranked #6 overall is great. Our games get mentioned on SportsCenter, and photos from our games show up in Sports Illustrated. But as season ticket holders, while we cheer on the success of good plays, we curse those that don't go our way, and we're biting our nails as we anticipate just what could go wrong. As the rains come down, we think about how just the slightest thing could upset this squad and force their season to slip out of their fingers. Whether we're surrounded by gloomy skies and precipitation or we find the skies cleared, we'll be rooting on our squad and crossing our fingers in hope that, finally, they reach their full potential and make us proud.

As far as Web 2.0 companies are concerned, Spokeo isn't the newest one on the block. And the extra time they took to improve their product over the last several months certainly gave them a leg up on those who hadn't yet left the "idea" phase.

The company was profiled on TechCrunch way back in November of 2006, and hit ZDNet this January. But of the companies I talked to at the PlugandPlay Expo today, they were among the few I could see using right away - assuming a few tweaks.


Click to Enlarge Images

Spokeo aims to aggregate data from multiple social networks and blogs in one central location. Targeted at the hard-core Web 2.0 user who has accounts at more than one social network (like MySpace and Friendster), the site gives you a one-stop destination to follow what all your "friends" are saying from all your sites. You can also import your RSS feed subscriptions via OPML, as I did this evening, from Google Reader.

As the company's VP of Marketing, Mital Poddar, illustrated to me, if you have a friend who only updates their blog every 45 days, and then complains that nobody made any comments on their post, most likely because everybody gave up on them publishing, you can ask Spokeo to watch that blog, be notified when they do post, and be up and making comments in minutes. Also, instead of having to log in separately to MySpace, Friendster, Last.fm, Twitter and YouTube, you tell your Web browser to start on Spokeo, and get all the data in one place.

If I were a hard-core social net user, Spokeo would be a great place for me to keep tabs on all my Web friends in their disparate places. As I mentioned before, I recently made Google Reader my go to start page, and if Spokeo could add on top of it with valuable data, a move that way just might make sense. But there are still big gaps. For instance, Spokeo doesn't yet support two of the biggest networks I actually do use - including Facebook and LinkedIn. Mital and I talked about Facebook and LinkedIn at the conference today, so I can only hope those two services will also soon be supported.

And there's always the question of "How will they make money?" As mentioned in my last note, many of the companies, including Spokeo, are looking for advertisers. Mital talked about ad space being available below user profiles, or intermixing sponsored feed items and posts within Spokeo's presentation to users, just as Facebook does today in the News Feed. User growth, targeted ads, and linking context with advertisements would spur revenues beyond where they are today.

As Web 2.0 sites go, Spokeo is easy to use and has a clean interface, with nice Mac-like rounded corners, plenty of icons, and simplified addition of new friends to your "Buddy List", whether they be friends on a social network or a stand-alone Web site. The site enables you to customize the look and feel via multiple themes, and works well on both Safari and Firefox (a plus). However, you can't move sections of the site around, like you can with iGoogle or My Yahoo!, so there's still room to grow. I'll be keeping watch on Spokeo as they continue to enhance their service, and if I end up using it a lot, you'll be sure to hear about it.