In case you were interested in purchasing the “Audiovox SMT5600″:1 Microsoft-based smartphone and wanted to know how the camera shots looked, I’ve uploaded a few to the “Zoinger Flickr”:2 channel an affiliate on the “Zoinger Network”:3.

Of course, you could have also just gone directly to Flickr and searched on _SMT5600_ and found a bunch of “sample shots”:4.

[1(Zoinger mini-review of the SMT5600)]http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/03/15/10.05.52/

[2(Zoinger Flickr channel)]http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoinger

[3(Read all about the Zoinger Network)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/04/18/zoinger-becomes-the-zoinger-network/

[4(Flickr search on SMT5600)]http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/smt5600/

I’m sure you’ve all heard about it now, but Google is offering a personalizable home page as one of their “lab”:1 offerings. Not much really to write about it, since it’s basically a stripped-down version of Yahoo!’s My Yahoo!. However, I am sure that Google will be adding more modules to the offering to be competitive with My Yahoo!.

It will be interesting to see if Google rolls this feature out into a wider release in the future. This would probably push Yahoo! into offering more personalization on their home page as a result. Competition is a great thing.

Want examples of a lack of competition? How about the fact that IE (IE7 specifically) is *finally* going to offer “tabbed browsing”:2 — about two or three years late. I can guarantee that the only reason why Microsoft is releasing a version of IE before Longhorn ships is Firefox’s success. Without some competition in the browser market, Microsoft was fine with not improving IE.

So, who is going to be the winner in personalization? The user.

[2(IE7 will have tabs... about two years late)]http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/05/16/417732.aspx

[1(Google labs home page)]http://labs.google.com/

As stated “here”:1, noctilucent clouds are:

bq.. Clouds at extremely high altitude, about 85 km, that literally (as the name suggests) shine at night. They form in the cold, summer polar mesopause and are believed to be ice crystals. Because of their high altitude, in a very dry part of the atmosphere, noctilucent clouds are rather an enigma and are being studied by a number of people around the world.

p. More information on these clouds can be found at the “NLC FAQ”:2. Here’s a nice pic of some of these clouds.

[1(A noctilucent cloud site)]http://lasp.colorado.edu/noctilucent_clouds/

[2(Noctilucent cloud FAQ site)]http://www.nlcnet.co.uk/nlcfaq.htm

OMG, a weather site that I’ve never seen. I found this one over on Doc Searls “blog”:2.

So, if you are heading up to the Great White North, you might want to check this “site”:1 for the current auroral activity. The range is from 1 (low activity) to 10 (high). Here’s today’s summary map which rates a “7.”

[2(Doc Searls blog post on auroral activity)]http://doc.weblogs.com/2005/05/15

[1(NOAA auroral activity site)]http://sec.noaa.gov/pmap/