In support of the entrepreneurial spirit, I thought I’d plug a couple of new sites produced by my friends.

Let’s start with one of my great loves: cars.  I enjoy driving cars.  I enjoy talking about cars.  I enjoy working on cars.  My inner child can’t stop ogling high-end exotic cars like Ferraris and Aston Martins.  Sadly, my very real aging self needs more reliable, more practical transportation on a daily basis.

I love my Subaru Outback.  It’s not fast, it’s not filled with electronic gizmos, and it’s even a bit on the ugly side.  But it’s dependable, affordable, versatile, and great for hauling my hockey gear to ice rinks in the middle of blizzards.  Plus, it made two trips between Minnesota and California while significantly overloaded.  It’s a solid car.

Middle Class Motoring, run by my friend John, celebrates “middle class” cars of all types.  I like the idea.  It’s a mix of reviews, arguments, and retrospectives.  Plus, the recurring segments have titles like “Car Crushes” and “Crap Car of the Week.”  How can you go wrong?

One of my other great loves is hockey.  Unfortunately, none of my friends have built any sites related to hockey, so we’ll move on to…

Photography.  I have passion for photography.  Even though my idle Flickr stream might suggest otherwise, I still love the art of taking photos.  I’m just on sabatical while I work on my photo deblurring product.

I like to think that I know a thing or two about capturing images with a camera, but that skill did not come easily.  It was won through hard work and countless hours of practice.  I had many questions along the way.  Some were answered on photography forums, and others were eventually puzzled out.  It would have been nice to have a consolidated place to find answers to my photography questions online.

PhotoQnA, run by my friend Tyler, provides and easy-to-use service for asking and answering photography questions.  It’s similar in form to Stack Overflow (and in fact uses the same engine): users can post questions, users can answer questions, and users can vote on the questions and answers (a la Digg).  The internal search function works quite well, and the reputation system supports and rewards high-quality dialogue.   If you have a photography-related question, I encourage you to post it there.

Both sites are relatively new, so a few parts are rough around the edges and the content is not too extensive.  However, they satisfy previously unmet needs and niches, so I have high hopes for them.