It’s time again this year to vote for your favorite blogs of 2007. The Bloggie Awards have opened up voting for this year’s awards in a number of categories.

Time once again to get out your blogrolls. The Weblog Awards are a non-profit project created in 2001 to award the best blogs. All the Bloggie winners are chosen by the public. Who are you going to vote for?

As always, there are some pretty cool sites out there to chose from. Get out there and pick the best sites of 2007!

Those crazy Japanese and their cool robots. Plen is a little robot with only one real purpose… he skates. Whether on rollarskates or on a skateboard, Plen tears it up. Though he does have a hefty price tag of $2000, watch the video below, and you might just think it’s worth it.

A little late on this post, but the day after Christmas there was a little bit of housecleaning done at Frederick’s Photography. Over 1100 lbs. of old traditional photography equipment was loaded up and taken to the scrap yard. It was kind of a sad day to see thousands of dollars worth of equipment being tossed out as junk because there is simply no market for this type of stuff any more (even on ebay, auctions for similar equipment go without any bids). My parents have operated a photography studio for over 27 years now, and like most of the industry, has switched to all digital. So now this 1100+ lbs. of equipment has been replaced by a few computers. The load of equipment we hauled off to the junkyard included quite a bit of stuff. There were several darkroom enlargers, including one that I spent a fair amount of time on in high school printing proofs while working for my parents. There was also a big old photo paper processor that just about took up an entire room hauled away with the other junk. I’m sure I’m probably missing something or totally wrong on the equipment that I remember. I’ll let me dad fill in the details in the comments area. So it was a little sad to see almost 3 decades of equipment being tossed out as junk, but I guess that’s technology for you. Always pushing forward.

Flickr set of the whole process

I always seem to be on vacation when Apple does their big January announcement. And since that happened over a week ago, (and since the media goes crazy any time Apple releases something new) there’s isn’t much of a chance you haven’t heard at least some sort of rumblings about the new Apple iPhone.

I won’t go into incredible detail on what it is and what it does, since that information is plastered all over the internet. I will say this thing is a sleek looking device (most things Apple creates can be called “sleek”). They’ve put together a nice smart phone, though they stray from calling it that. Regardless of how this thing eventually performs, at the very lowest level, I think the iPhone is going to be a good thing because it will force the cell phone carries to bump up their phone choices. With a nice powerful internet/music device in the iPhone overshadowing the tiny locked-down selection of phones typically offered by carriers this could be a good thing. Even though I like what the iPhone can do, and it looks like a very well-designed device, I don’t think I’d go right out and buy one (when they’re available in June). I’m very happy with my Treo. The clincher for me (and maybe it’s just because this is what I’m used to) is that I feel I’m able to expand what it can do more than the somewhat locked down iPhone. I have a lot more choices for applications that can go on my existing device. Plus, I’m not spending $499 or $599 for it. Who knows though, just like all things Apple releases, I like to see it close up/hands on. Maybe after doing that it will win me over. Guess I won’t know till June.

Apple also officially released their AppleTV which was announced last fall. I pretty much feel the same way about this as I did before. I think this thing would be perfect if it had a built in DVR. Add the Tivo functionality and I’m totally sold on this thing. As it stands now, it’s mainly just an extension of iTunes to the TV. I see the need they’re trying to fill with this, but for me the need isn’t really large enough for me to plunk down $299 for this device. Again, maybe this is just the foot in the set-top-device door for Apple. They did remove “computers” from their name and are now just Apple Inc. which could be seen as a move to focus more in the home entertainment/consumer electronics realm. Or it could be that they’re just changing it now because of the focus they’re already putting into that area. I guess the future will tell which direction they’re going to go with this thing.