I doubt anyone in the year 2000 could have predicted the mileage SNL would get out of their “more cowbell” skit.  Eight years later the laughs still continue, with the now famous catchphrases getting more pop culture references than ever.

Out of this comes a cool piece of crud from the developers at Echo Nest.  MoreCowbell.dj is a site that lets you upload your MP3s and digitally add cowbell to it.  It’s not a half-assed effort either.  Your music is analyzed and the cowbell sound is inserted with proper tune and tempo, as if Gene Frenkle himself is playing along on the track.  You can also choose to add Christopher Walken soundclips into the mix.

After your upload is done, you can get a HTML snippet to add your creation to your blog or MySpace page.

It’s crud like this that makes the Internet worthwhile.

TechCrud Grade: A

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Ok, I’ve been getting plenty of new site submissions coming across my desk, but nothing crudworthy enough to warrant their own blog post.   Here’s just a few…

Like|Umm - It’s a Digg wannabe, but not as interesting, useful, or fun.  And by the way, your domain name like umm… sucks.

TechCrud Grade: F

koornk - Ditto the proceeding review, replacing Digg with Twitter.

TechCrud Grade: F

ur tbox - A social network for young narcissists. Nice looking site, but it’s all style and no substance. Where’s the talent?

TechCrud Grade: C

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In case you missed the obituary, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has declared this as the end of Web 2.0.  The economy is in the toilet.  Venture capital is drying up and massive budget cuts and layoffs are imminent for many internet companies.

Perhaps the easy money is done, but is it really the end of Web 2.0?  I say no.  The concepts that define Web 2.0 will continue on.  Sites built on user generated content, daily launches of new social networking sites, paper thin revenue models and business plans,  even silly domain names and pastel logos… these things will not go away.

Mark my words, for every Web 2.0 death we see in the coming months, another start-up will be waiting to take it’s place.  Team Cyprus won’t stop believing.  Neither will I.

Web 2.0 lives!  Bring on the crud!

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Today we’re checking out Feng-GUI (fung-gway), a heatmap simulator for webmasters and visual designers.  In their own words,

Find out how people see your website, photo or ad and which areas are getting most of the attention. This artificial intelligence service simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals.

Feng-GUI is very easy to use.  You can start uploading images and generating simulated heatmaps within moments, with no registration needed.  Here’s what it spit out for a screenshot of our site.

Feng GUI likes the pretty pictures.

One minor annoyance as a webmaster is the need to screenshot their site and upload it as an image.  Hopefully future versions will include built-in thumbnailing to allow webmasters to simply input a URL.

Feng-GUI cleverly borrows inspiration for its name from Feng Shui, the modern Chinese practice of arranging objects to generate good energy.  Like it’s namesake, I suspect Feng-GUI also incorporates some degree of bullshit into their algorithms.  Take my next image for example.

Who littered? Feng GUI wants to know!

While Feng-GUI surely fits the definition of tech crud, It is always refreshing to see a startup with an actual technological development behind it over yet another regurgitated “social networking for [bleh]” business model. In that respect Feng-GUI earns good marks from this reviewer.

The Good: Easy and cheap, just the way I like them.

The Bad: Not all that useful.

TechCrud Grade: B-

Forecast: Relegated to life as a tech novelty, despite improvements in its technology.

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