So, the other night I was watching the NBC show Last Comic Standing, and they had a contest where each of the standup comics rode around Hollywood and Beverly Hills on a tour bus, providing entertainment for the people on the tour. The comic that won the approval of the people on the tour won the contest. None of the comics knew anything about the sights that they’d be driving by on the tour. All of the comics but one tried to entertain the crowd by cracking them up, basically just clowning for laughs. One of the comics acted like a real tour director, he pointed at the various houses, telling the people on the tour which famous people had lived there and odd little anecdotes about their lives. The trick was that he was making it all up, he sounded informed, even authoritative, and he didn’t miss a beat the entire time. He crushed his competition — the people on the tour wanted information, and weren’t in a position to judge whether any of the information they were getting was factual. I think that many weblogs that purport to explain what’s going on in Iraq are like the winning comic.

Today I’m reading all about the Spring framework which seems to be an alternative or complement to just about everything I use when I create a web application.

I always wondered why Orkut was an ASP application.