Remember Avantgo?

Old-timers may remember Avantgo, one of the first web companies to serve content to the handheld market.

In my case, I used a Palm V and Palm VII to sync with Advantgo, which hosted feeds from a variety of news outlets. It was the early days of the mobile web, with mostly text and grayscale screens.

I stopped using Avantgo years ago, and stumbled across their name only periodically when I'd dive into bakersfield.com's metrics and see one or two users reading our content from an age-old unregistered feed we created to circumvent Avantgo's pay-to-play wall. It officially died this summer, although its last sign of life was long before that.

Avantgo lives on Wired.comMy reason for this post, is that while Avantgo died six months ago, Wired magazine's "Wired News On The Go" page is living in the past. My guess is the only Wired readers still using Avantgo are the same folks who still use betamax video recorders. 

Thanks, Wired, for a nice blast to the past.

UPDATE: Wired has since removed the "dead" page in question.

Music geek alert: "All Songs" Best of 2009

I'm a music geek but the four folks behind NPR's "All Songs Considered" are geeks beyond all measurement. I say that with love.

That geekiness is in evidence in "ASC's" best-of 2009 podcast, which includes some fun categories like biggest surprise, best artists not previously featured on "ASC," and more. You'll likely hear lots of great music for the first time. You'll also hear the four hosts fawning over more than a few little-known artists/poets, so much so I wondered whether they were purposely ruling out top nods to anyone who ever had a sniff of commercial radio, let alone a mainstream magazine article.

Overall, I found this year's "ASC" choices soft. Too much mopey soft pop-rock and not enough bite and volume. Co-host Carrie Brownstein, of Sleater-Kinney fame, offered up one of the few songs with an electric guitar, but even she seemed to favor the more acoustic stuff.

More in line with my tastes is the All Songs Considered Listener Picks, which are not so far afield and which have a bit more bite overall.

Music criticism at its worst

Oh my goodness, what a weird trip.

Just got through listening to an audiobook version of “Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis,” Warren Zanes’ installment in the “Thirty Three and a Third” series of books in which people of note examine classic albums.

Zanes, best known as a member of the early 80s country-punkers Del Fuegos and currently a suit at the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, idolizes this famous Southern soul album, in which the diva Springfield collides with the rough power of 1968 Memphis.

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, his examination of the album ends almost as soon as it starts. 

Zanes offers up some great background on the factors fueling an amazing album (including Jerry Wexler and Chip Moman’s production mastery) but for the most part, he’s is off on a variety of head-scratching tangents. Zanes fancies himself as a seasoned interpretative historian but I felt as if someone had slipped me some bad Hunter S. Thompson outtakes.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The Rock N Roll Hall of Fame seems to welcome self-indulgent tripe.