As you get older, you earn the luxury of being more and more able to select with whom you associate with. at five years old, your best friends are those who live on your street. Once grade school hits, options expand to those you meet in at recess - those who like kickball play kickball, those who swing swing. By college, you have both the freedom and maturity level to choose friends who share in your interests and are easy for you to get along with.
Work shrinks that world down to whatever size your cube farm is. How good of a friend I am with people in my office is directly correlated to how many steps they are away from my pencil holder. Guys in the cube behind mine whom I would never normally associate with are old buddies, we already have inside jokes and code words. Guys that seem pretty cool when I see them at the vending machine might as well live in Cuba as much as I'll hang out with them. I'm not saying that I will never be able to meet cool people where I work, it's just that when I do, that work will have a $10 cover charge and my nametag will say "Swerv."

Recently, I found three new tools that caught my attention.

• Buzznet allows for photoblogs to be built quickly, easily and for free. A photoblog, as you probably guessed, is a weblog that is focused around photographic content. Users set up their own photoblog and e-mail in photos. The site automatically stores the photo to your own site, pulls the e-mail subject for the post subject and any body text for comments on the photo. Pretty smart. It will even post photos sent by mobile phone (finally, that camera phone might be useful for something). Easy cheese.
• Dozen Holes was designed to track and settle bets with family and friends. It allows friends to log a bet and once the outcome is clear, request payment. There is even an online balance sheet that tallies all that is due and all that is owed.
• A9 is probably one you have heard about (background). It's a new search website (and company) started by Amazon. It helps you track your search history so you can find what you have found before, and it lets you search books. It lets you search the contents of books, not just the titles. It's pretty impressive -- Amazon has been furiously scanning the contents of books for a couple of years now, and as a result, they have a database of book content that is fully searchable. Nuts, right?

Click with impunity, friends. If you set up a photoblog at Buzznet, let us know.