Pretty bad. Bill Rini, www.rini.org, posted a set of pictures of Internet World Los Angeles on his site. These pictures just show how bad things are. I remember speaking to packed audiences back in the good old days of the dot-com era in 1996 and 1997. Now it’s a wasteland. Enjoy the photos — perhaps we’ll pull out of this tech slump soon.

Article #2 was published today on Builder.COM. If you’re a development manager or someone who hires software developers, you might enjoy reading Greet Your Next Job Candidate with a Whiteboard and Marker, a discussion on how to interview. Those of you on the other side of this tech bust, you might want to read it also. This is a technique that I’ve seen applied sporadically, but you should be prepared for it none the less. I think it’s one of the best ways to find out if a job candidate will really work out.

The title says it all. ISP News posted an article today — “Want Broadband With Your Fries?” — describing Softbank’s move to put Wi-Fi into McDonald’s in Japan. Wi-Fi continues to move quickly as the hotspot technology of choice. Several US companies are doing the same thing, including Starbucks. One of the critical technologies that will have to emerge is universal identification between the providers. I’d hate to have to subscribe to three or five different Wi-Fi providers to get service. I see something similar to roaming service for cellular networks emerging for the Wi-Fi providers.

The Washington Post published an article on Apple yesterday discussing two new capabilities they are adding into their systems.

The first is iChat, an AOL Instant Messenger compatible client. This is reportedly the first time that AOL has allowed an external party to create a compatible IM client. Perhaps this will bode well for Jabber and others that have continually been reverse-engineering AIM because the folks at AOL haven’t been interested in other clients. No specifics on the quid pro quo, though — one has to wonder what AOL gets out of the deal. Perhaps they get bundled onto every shipped system for free.

The other capability is called Rendezvous. Rendezvous is a means of automatically connecting computers in a local area together for the purposes of sharing assets. For example two wireless-enabled computers in a room could easily discover each other and share music files without requiring a server to be present. A company called Calligo also does some of this. Rendezvous is based on the ZeroConf.

Apple has generally been more aggressive about technologies like these. They focus much effort on the user experience and try to provide simple, meaningful solutions. As a wireless user, for example, I find it sad that an arbitrary collection of Wi-Fi enabled computers can’t self-network — with DHCP servers or fixed IP addresses, connectivity isn’t possible. As someone who travels with Wi-Fi cards for my laptop and iPaq, I have never understood why those two devices can’t just figure out how to connect with each other when no access point is present and without requiring special configuration. Maybe Apple’s on to something …