My final all-American brand is Colgate-Palmolive (NYSE: CL). The company is well-known for its toothpaste and toothbrushes. But Colgate-Palmolive also owns dozens of strong brand names, including Irish Spring, Speed Stick, Ajax, and many others.

Some investors may think of Colgate-Palmolive as a dull stock. That's fine by me.

The shares are far less volatile than most stocks on Wall Street. Even though the market overall is well below the highs it reached in the third quarter of 2007, shares of Colgate-Palmolive were never punished nearly as hard.

Over the past year, I've been using Yahoo's Flickr, which is a cutting-edge photo sharing site. In fact, the picture here is linked from my Flickr account.

Flickr is easy to use and powerful. A big part of this is because it uses a programming approach called AJAX.

While AJAX has been around since the late 1990s, it was really Google that put it on the map -- with its slick GMail product (the company's latest spreadsheet product is also written in AJAX).  Basically, with AJAX, you can do things like drag-and-drop, auto-fill, tags, keyboard short-cuts, in-line editing and so on.

Now, Yahoo! is adding AJAX pizzazz to its companion site, Yahoo Photos. In fact, Yahoo Photos is #1 on the Web, with about 30 million users. In all, there are 2 billion photos.