Last night Andrew Bird played at the Berklee Performance Center to a full house. I caught the tail end of the opener, Joan as Policewoman, and agreed fully with something she said — it is great to hear music in a space built with good acoustics. The Berklee hall is oddly long and narrow, meaning a lot of the seats are far away from the stage, but the sound more than makes up for it.

Bird played most of the best songs from his fantastic new album, Armchair Apocrypha, including “Plasticities”, “Fiery Crash”, “Imitosis” and “Armchairs” among songs of previous albums. Each song sounded like a different version than what ended up on the album. More than just the changes for translating them to performing live, they were a completely alternate take. People had different reactions, but the crowd loved it and my vote was with the majority. Lastly, among his musical talents on the guitar, violin and glockenspiel, it was his spot on whistling that impressed me most. If whistling is a competition at the next Olympics, he should try to represent the U.S. of A.

Last night I went to the first Boston Web Innovators dinner, focused on the topic of widgets. The event was organized by David Beisel and held at the Cambridge offices of Venrock. The concept of the evening was to pick a theme for discussion and have a smaller gathering (10-15) than at the normal WebInno demo & networking events, which have grown quite large. Among those in attendance there seemed to be a range of familiarity with widgets; including those actively building and marketing them, to those trying to understand how to market and monetize them, or just wondering if 2007 will be the year of the widget. A few highlights and thoughts:

• David Cutler of Oddcast gave a short overview of widgets and talked about a few successful widgets like Southwest Airlines’ Ding!. As with many new technologies, the terminology can be a little confusing. There are web, desktop and mobile widgets, other terms like badges, and an array of technologies to build them. Jon from GuildCafe shared some his experiences in building widgets.
• There was some discussion about how to monetize them. Jon expressed skepticism (and I agree) about whether embedding advertising would turn off many potential users. Although, as was mentioned, there are services like WeatherBug that are ad supported. I’d venture that there is a difference between ads shown only to me versus ads that run on a public facing page or social network profile. At a minimum the ads would have to be well targeted, or slide into the content like an intro ad to a video.
• Widgets on the web further complicate how to measure and analyze traffic. Fred Wilson blogged about the topic today on overcounting widget hits. For example, we’ve built badges for tourb.us that allow fans or bands to list their upcoming shows on their blogs or sites, and for a while even Fred ran it on his badge-covered blog (when it was sporting even more bling). We served a lot of badge “views” but certainly those hits aren’t equal to a view on our site directly. Is there a reasonable way to discount those views? On some sites the widget may be front and center, and on others buried among many others.
• After discussion by the full table it broke into more informal conversations. Always interesting since the WebInno events draw a bright crowd, but most of my chatting wasn’t about widgets per se, other than some thoughts on Apollo, Silverlight and what to make of JavaFX.

Recently I’ve spent time visiting at Mass General, and as in all hospitals there is a lot of waiting around. One night while I was there, a fellow vistor spotted my Red Sox hat and started talking about growing up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. From there, detailed discussions followed of baseball well before my time. Stories about meeting Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese. Comparing recollections on Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard ‘Round the World. Of specific teams, players, plays and dashed hopes from 50 years ago. And about different grudges with the Yankees. It struck me what great escapism this was. How many subjects let strangers connect so easily with a sense of shared history and mutual passion? While they exchanged amusing anecdotes the Red Sox game on TV slowly chewed up the hours of waiting.

Now, of course, had this gentleman been a Yankees fan it would have been completely different situation.

Today, May 5th, Flickr is hosting a project called “24 Hours of Flickr”. The idea is to capture what happens in a single day around the world. Selections from the group’s photo pool will be featured at Flickr events and in a book. My contribution, above, is from an afternoon walk on this beautiful day.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists played at Avalon last night. Having never seen Mr Leo perform, I wasn’t sure what to expect. He certainly delivers a tight, energetic show. They opened with “Sons of Cain” off their new album, Living With The Living and hardly took a breath for half the set. The full crowd liked the mix of songs from the new album and older ones, that included a few from my favorite Ted Leo album, The Tyranny of Distance. Although for my money the best song of the night might have been “The High Party”.