2006 Web Technology Trends
Nice to see the author acknowledge that "Web 2.0 got overhyped and the term is now generally accepted as just a marketing term, akin to Dot Com."

Via Eric Alterman, here's an interesting an article on Southern racism by Rick Perlstein that does two interesting things. First it cites a study by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears that a regression analysis shows that racist candidates are more likely to win in the South. I think there's a flaw in this analysis, but it's still interesting. Second, it attempts to find the precise moment at which middle America became defined as the authentic part of America.

Best Books of 2006 Already?
I didn't think they would start this early but I have heard that book publishing season is mostly over so it would make sense. Here's The 10 Best Books of 2006 from the New York Times. Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart is at the top of the fiction list, and having read some Shteyngart in Granta, I'd recommend it for hysterical realism fans. I'd read it if I had more time but I think I'm going to pick up Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl first, which is hysterical realism served with postmodernism.
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright has been on my Amazon wish list for a while but at the moment I don't think I want to read something as discouraging as the story of "the efforts of a handful of American intelligence officers alert to the approaching danger but frustrated, time and again, in their efforts to stop it."
P.S. I'm curious about the Amy Hempel book. If you've read it please leave a comment.
P.P.S. Fimoculous, the media glutton, has started his annual list of lists. I enjoyed the Best Logos of 2006 list. Fimoculous's favorite is Best Servers in Movies, but that's not exclusive to 2006.

UPDATE (12/18): Fixed link to fimoculous.