Bagcheckr

I had to review this because the title ends in "--kr", meaning it must be Web 2.0 and hot. You know, like Flickr. As it happens, it's neither. It is however, one of the least useful sites I've seen in a while. Which makes it something special, in a sense. So, this is a site on which you can create and save the list of things you need to pack in your suitcase(s) when you go on vacation, and then check before you come back to make sure you haven't left anything behind. Very similar to writing the list down on a piece of paper, in fact, except instead of a pencil and a piece of paper you need to take your laptop PC with you. Well, that's about it. There are some handy public lists already, to help get you started and give you some ideas for what to take with you, based on what other people have taken somewhere with them. So, you could save yourself a lot of time by simply packing the things someone else has packed already. I can see that being pretty useful. The weight of everything may also be added to make sure that you aren't carrying too much. So if you make your list public, you're potentially saving someone from weighing their own socks; this assumes that your socks weigh more or less the same as someone else's socks, which seems reasonable. I think this could make an outstanding iPhone app, one day when it gets out of beta. The public lists are clearly a beta as well. A trip to Turkey, currently the most comprehensive of the lists, requires that in addition to the usual clothes, camera, cell phone and so on, you also take a metal cup, knife and spoon. So either Turkish restaurants leave a lot to be desired, or you should avoid room service. For Moscow, you need only four woolen socks; well, it's cold over there. And another list, which is in Russian, suggests an inflatable mattress. I think perhaps the lists could use a bit of work, to be honest. Well, OK, I'm making a bit of fun of this one and that's probably unkind. I'm not sure what the first language of the writers is; the site is in France, but there is a definite Russian element here. So I should probably give credit for the sheer difficulty of producing a site for the American market, in English. It's a shame that people for whom English is a challenge still feel that it's not worth writing sites for their home markets, in their native languages; the web still has a very long way to go, before it can claim to be truly worldwide. Sadly I think this is a fine example of a project which is nowhere remotely ready being thrown online as a "beta", possibly to start attracting the attention of search engines (and venture capitalists) way before it's worth searching for. But then I'm old enough to remember when things were finished before they were published, which shows you how terribly old I've got.