I'm doing more and more research on Ajax. Ajaxian is a great "all things Ajax" site for one to do research. It seems to be a very independent site and balanced. Here's a few gems I found on their site over the last few weeks.

• Google Reader sucks less - Google Reader has long be considered the Lame Duck of the Google family. The interface just didn't feel right and everyone knew it. It's been relaunched with a new UI and I'll be giving it a try for a few days. I'm still a FeedDemon fan, but since the wife and I have been sharing calendars with Google Calendar, I've been reintroducing myself to the Google AJAX properties. It looks a lot like Gmail, so it's easy to see these two apps becoming one in the near future.
• Room Visualizer - Check out this amazing AJAX Room Visualizer in Firefox. You can drag and drop paint and carpet samples on to various room layouts and see how it looks. Wish I had this before I remodeled the living room.
• Frametastic - This Firefox-only quick CSS layout prototyper makes clever use of the Prototype Firefox libraries.
• How to detect IE7+ in Javascript - Too bad we have having moved pass all this.
• Payraise Calculator - This is an interesting little calculator...it's simple, but fairly elegant and gives on an idea of what Ajax-based Bill Payment could look like.
• Dynamic Graphics - It should be a little easier, and lighter weight than it is in ASP.NET to make simple graphs. This is a nice example of how to do it in Rails.

Also, an interesting tip about Ajax performance from Max at hive7.com. Max had confirmed a while back that Firefox 1.5 was WAY faster in JavaScript performance against IE7. However, in his recent internal testing he was seeing 5-7 second-long scripts in Firefox 1.5 take under 1 second in Firefox 2 RC2. IE7 was taking as long as a minute in some instances. Great to see the Firefox team working so hard to make Firefox's Javascript implementation so speedy.