100 Best Products

Kent Newsome critiques PC World's 100 Best Products of The Year. As usual I agree with Kent's take on most of these things except his assertion that Photoshop Elements is overrated. I've used PSP, Elements, Gimp, Picasa and other programs and while each has it's strengths and weaknesses, I have to say that Adobe's experience with image-editing apps was not lost on Elements. It has many good features to recommend it, not all of them apparent until you use it a while.

An interesting point made near the end of his post:

Where is Digg, Techmeme and Technorati? For that matter, where's MySpace?

No Treos, no blackberry devices?

No Feedburner or Odeo or Audacity? No Skype?

You can either put it down to be being proudly 'ahead of the curve' or more realistically, 'living in the rss-enabled xml-ized wonder-sphere that floats way outside the mainstream'. More and more I feel like I'm reading and listening to a community sadly isolated from the real world. Just listen to the latest Gillmor Daily. I finally figured out that I don't really care who Esther Dyson is or what she does, no matter how much Steve pumps these things as earth-altering issues. Maybe I'm just too stupid to understand it all. But still, I'm happy just tryin'.