What is it? Well, not a lot at the moment, but it’s got a nice web 2.0-sounding name, doesn’t it? That’s what you get when you try to register a domain name an hour and a half after you should have gone to bed. Actually, as of this posting, it’s a mostly-empty database of its users’ favorite restaurants. A bit more work will allow the users to mark others as friends and see their reviewed restaurants and other social-networky type things like that. Also, there will be tags. There must be tags. This is web 2.0 we’re talking about here.

So, if you have a moment and the desire, sign up for an account and give it a little test spin. It’s not guaranteed to work. It’s probably guaranteed not to work in some places. If you find anything incredibly broken or ugly, send me an e-mail to info at foodry dot com.

Please note that there is no AJAX or other neat shiny things yet. Those will come, do not fear.

Also, Firefox 2.0 has neat spell checking built right in. I like that.

Update 10/04/06 11:38 PM: We have tags!

Update 10/05/06 6:43 PM: Tags work for real, now. I mean it.

I’m still getting intermittant 503 errors, so maybe they’re in the process of upgrading still. Or maybe they accidentally turned it on for a few minutes and are now rushing to turn it back off.

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My feeling about Amazon Shorts is it’s best suited for writers who already have a significant and self-sustaining fan base. i.e., writers who are rather popular already. In the SF/F genre, I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that if Neil Gaiman or Orson Scott Card or Connie Willis dropped something into Amazon Shorts, they would be likely to make a fair chunk of cash in short order. Some other writer whose name recognition is slightly less luminous — a comfortably mid-list writer, in other words — might not see a difference one way or another. But strictly in terms of the money, most writers (and I would include myself here) would probably be better off going to the venue where the money is offered up front, unless said author is ready, willing and able to flog the Amazon Short to all and sundry on a regular basis. If you’re not an inveterate self-promoter, this probably won’t be your bag.

The comments in the blog post lead into a conversation about how the Amazon Shorts program, with some good editors on board to weed out the dreck, could lead into the direction of self-publishing. Maybe I should start working on a short story in case they open the program to any hack with a keyboard. Then I could make my 40% of $0.49 when my mom buys a copy.

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It’s still a bit early to get excited about spring blooms, but I was just looking around on my web server and found an old site I started to put together about my garden. I called it Garden Notes and it was going to be an attempt at providing semi-interesting articles about the various plants that were growing in my landscape. I didn’t get very far before I was sidetracked by work, but I have two articles up there. One’s about my Monkey Puzzle Tree and the other’s about the Hyacinths that were blooming last year. Hopefully I can find some time to add some more when things start growing again.

Update (8/6/05): I’ve moved Garden Notes to garden-notes.lot42.com and am now running it as a blog using Movable Type. That should make updating a bit easier and may improve its performance in search engines, should I ever get inclined to write some more articles for it.