'Have you seen your mother, baby, standing in the shadow...?'

I'm not the crispiest chip in the bag but I do know this: when you get the message above (in teeny tiny print: click on it, booboo, so you can read it... doh!) when you log onto a new website intending to write about it in your blog, it does not bode well for that website.

First rule of not having contempt for your users (or at least not showing you have it): lose the Soviet–style "while we work to improve your user experience."

Because you have just degraded our user experience by acting as if we're brain–dead.

The first sentence should read: "Shadows is currently down."

Period.

But I digress.

Shadows came to my attention last evening when I read, on page 152 of an article about venture capital, in the new (February 2006) issue of Wired magazine, the following: "One of the startup's cofounders, Andrew Busey, unveiled a side project he'd been tinkering with for a few months. It was a product that would create a duplicate version of any Web site where users could post comments, share tips and information, and add relevant data."

Where can I get one?

I'd love to have a shadow bookofjoe in a parallel internet universe.

So I had my crack research team look into it.

Alas, their quest soon degenerated into the usual bafflement and confusion.

We opened an account and were all ready to set up bookofjoe but hit the wall very quickly.

We couldn't see anything in the Shadows, as it were: how to use it, what it actually did, nothing.

Just another set of blocks for bored young guys who don't know what to do with themselves or their Bubble 1.0 internet cashouts.