I’ve recently been hooked on listening to the live recordings from the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. With a lineup of artists such as The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Mamas and the Papas, Steve Miller Band, Jefferson Airplane and Otis Redding, just to name a few, the entire 4 disc collection is amazing. The recordings are clear, concise, and best of all, live!

I can only imagine what it must have been like to be at the festival in 1967. A year in which Vietnam is a hot topic, Jimmy Hoffa begins a sentence for attempted bribery of a jury and the 12th Street Riots begin in Detroit, music is the focus of this festival.

Events happening at this time, not only shape the politcial world, but the world of music and entertainment.

CNN Money has posted the The Next Net 25. These are CNN’s picks as the 25 startups that are reinventing the web. Lots of great sites made the cut, so this only tells me to expect great things in the future, since these companies are helping to influence the future of the web.

What companies do you feel should have made the cut?

As summer winds down and the talk of back to school begins, it also means Fair season is upon us. The Michigan State Fair opened this past week. While this is nothing new, what caught my attention was the concerts happening at the fair.

Looking over the lineup and seeing such acts as Alice Cooper, The Dirty Americans, Twisted Sister, Three Dog Night and a few hometown heros, like Mitch Ryder.

I was a little shocked by the fact that the bands were of an older, heavy metal genre. Not that I’m not a fan of “We’re Not Gonna Take It’, but with all the Detroit area musical legends and icons, I was expecting to see more of a hometown flavor represented. With the Detroit area having produced some of the greatest musical acts and having such an influence on music as we see it today, I was hoping to see a greater lineup.

I don’t have plans to attend any of these concerts, but I would love to hear your feedback, either if you are planning or have attended some of these concerts at the fair.

For those about to rock, I salute you!

A couple of new apps have caught my attention this past week. The first, Pixsy, is a Photo and Video search engine. Pixsy was named as one of Time Magazine’s 50 Coolest Websites in 2006 earlier in August. Pixsy is banking on the idea of licensing the company’s large (on pace to hit 5 billion) thumbnail shots to medium and large scale companies for use to enhance search or news pages.

Pixsy is soon-to-releasing a demo site, StarHabit, next week, so be sure and check that out.

The second app that caught my attention was, Wablet. Wablet is a Flash-based service that can access all of your major IM accounts. The IM sessions can be embedded in blogs and other social networking services, or can be be placed as pop-ups on other web pages.

For more on Wablet, you can read the full story as posted on TechCrunch.