Google kills another market. There’s still room for innovation if you can do something that’s different and better than porting MS Office to Rails. And there’s money to be made if you can build it for cheap. But right now, pop go another 10 startups.

GTalk is doing well. Just a hunch. I don’t have access to Google’s stats and I’m too lazy to check Alexa (as if they know). But judging by the people around me, the younger crowd that’s not heavily invested in AIM and YIM, it’s spreading faster and faster. The “works with GMail and runs in a browser” is the killer feature. It’s not going to be ICQ2, too much competition for rapid growth, and Skype still rules when it comes to conferencing. But Skype is a download and GMail is Web.

Resyndication. Unlike Scoble, someone is syndicating my content. But they took out a post about cell phones and mobile Web, and picked a few sentences into a blog that seems to be about cell phone batteries. Either their crawler is stupid, or they’re trying to reach me through my vanity feed. Either way, I don’t get it.

Akismet takes a nap. I spent a couple of hours this week cleaning up spam from the Wiki and Trac. Yesterday, Akismet took a nap for a few hours and my inbox was littered with over a hundred “please moderate” e-mails for spam comments. There must be a better way to deal with this.

assert_select goes Rails.
assert_select is done. I got full coverage for CSS 3 selectors, and assertions for handling HTML, RJS, feeds and e-mail. It was put to full use in the last release of co.mments. Just submitted to Rails core. If they’re interested it will be a great addition. It’s the best way I can think of to write functional tests without ever looking at the browser.

scrAPI goes 1.2.0. Actually a very small change, but the convention is to change the second version number when it affects the API. In addition to a bug fix and making element skips explicit, I also threw in a simple scraper for hAtom.

BarCamp. I only had time to attend the BBQ and bar crawl, but still one of my favorite event. Best place to meet people who know technology and more than that, know how to make a positive effect with technology. And bonus point, I got some amazing tips from Chris Messina. You’ll see them in action in due time.