9zonekarma [moved to a new home ]

I have been pretty excited about the web2.0 initiated social and community revolution - the world of blogs, wikis, open source and creative commons. However this era will be no different than web 1.0 of dot-bombs and supernova effects as well. Following are some of the good, bad and the ugly I have come across this week.

The Good: I discovered Pandora this week. I must have been hibernating (actually I was) the past few years because I never heard about this personalizable online music station service before. But I am pretty excited about two things here. 1) I think that they have a genius concept (not so sure about their commercial model though). I admire their music analysts who painfully analyze each and every song in their catalog (according to their website it takes 30 minutes to analyze and categorize a 4 min. song). 2) Amazingly simple and beautiful user experience (flash based). Kudos to them. I think they can license their MGP model to other online music stations to monetize their business better.

The Bad: This is weird but CouchSurfing a website that connects travelers with people who are willing to provide free accomodation self-crashed its site because of "irrecoverable" database crash and back-up snafu. What shocks me is how in this day and age can such a thing happen!. Plain bizzarre. Two things jump at me: 1) Casey-the-founder shouldn't be blaming his database admins and sign-from-the-universe for this. First thing he should do is slap himself hard and then move on 2) There's got to be someway of getting back from this. Shutting the site down seemed to be the first thing he did - not the last. Again sounds a little crazy. Read more for other's reactions on techcrunch. There is a lesson for every one of us. All of us at some point or the other take a lot of tech practices too easy.
PS:I like the couchsurfing concept - so i hope they come back up

The Ugly: It can't get any uglier than PayPerPost.com. Its a website that pays people to write reviews on products and services. Its a worse idea than the dot-com crazy era's ad supported internet service which required you to click on an ad once every 5 minutes. Does this signal the end of innocence for the blogosphere? I think their business model is going to change very soon - focusing more on commercial blogs.