October 2007

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Convenience wins, hubris loses

October 27, 2007 in music business by George | 2 comments

Unbelievably well-stated piece from Yahoo Music’s GM, Ian Rogers.

Maybe the smartest thing I’ve read all year:

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

I want to buy Ian a beer.

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Productivity With Safari

October 27, 2007 in Productivity, tech by George | No comments

safari logo

I prefer Safari to Firefox. There, I’ve said it. I know that I’m not supposed to feel this way, but I do. I also prefer Entourage to Apple’s Mail. Again, I know there’s something profoundly and deeply wrong with me, but there it is. I also really like anchovies.

If there is anyone else out there who has similar preferences (perhaps you have the other side of the locket I’ve been looking for), you might be interested in these very useful “plug ins” for Safari from J.Y. Design/Resources. I (hopefully correctly) put plug-ins in quotations, because Safari doesn’t really “do” plug-ins (hence many pimp-loving people’s affection for Firefox). So, these productivity tools aren’t really plug-ins, but they do make Safari even more useful than ever.

For instance, by dragging the “mail” link to your bookmark bar, you can then just click it, and a new email opens up with the link embedded in your message. Similarly, clicking on the “print” link pops open your print dialog.

[Update: No real reason to use the "print" bookmark, as you can just drag a print button in from: Safari/View/Customize Address Bar.]

Another very nice Safari time-saver is Twicetab! (their exclamation). With Twicetab! installed you simply double click on a blank space in the Safari tab bar, and a new tab is created.

These may seem minute, but if you multiply the amount of time you spend every day making extraneous mouse/keyboard gestures, they really add up.

TaskPaper

October 25, 2007 in GTD, Productivity by George | No comments

A bunch of buzz about a simple GTD-esque organization tool called TaskPaper.

I’ve been using it in the beta stage for a while, and do like it. It’s elegantly simple, and allows you to create contextualized (via the use of tags) projects and next actions.

It’s devoid of any real bells and whistles, and I frankly find this refreshing and helpful. I’ve been sort of frustrated by iGTD’s wonkiness recently, which seems a result of it’s overly-feature rich structure.

Here’s the basic workflow:

    •You create a project by typing in the name of the project and adding a colon at the end.
    •You create a new task (action) by beginning the action with a dash.
    •You tag (contextualize) the task by typing the @ symbol immediately in front of the tag you want to
    associate with the task.
    •When you complete a task you can click on the bullet next to the task to generate a (satisfying) line
    through the completed item.

Try it out with a 30-day free demo, and if you dig it, it’ll set you back $18.95

Daft Punk Widget

October 25, 2007 in marketing, music business, tech by George | No comments

daft punk

This is pretty darn cool, and is precisely the type of marketing I love to see.

Daft Punk has created a widget which provides potential customers with a wealth of information about their upcoming release.

As seen below, the widget is easily embedded into blogs or websites. Fans of the band can basically opt in to providing an ad for the band.

Now if only someone would tie the commerce element into the equation – e.g. allow bloggers to sell the artist’s work using the blog as the front-end, and providing a commission to the blogger – I think we’d have something.



As you can see, this is more like a mini-web site than a typical widget; very well done.

To get the code to embed this widget into your own site/blog, just click on the “code” button at the bottom of the player.

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OT: unnecessary quotation marks

October 24, 2007 in Off Topic by George | 1 comment

quotes

A “blog” devoted to the mis-use of “quotation” marks.

I “love” “it!”

[via Pop Candy]

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