More on Sharing...

For those of you who actually read this blog, you may have seen my post on Sharing News Articles. It seemed like I had things going pretty well.

I could click on an article from my RSS reader and share it, or add a bookmark that was shared - and have them all published from one URL.

There was a comment about the fact that there are entire systems made for this - http://www.tumblr.com/ was mentioned.

Then I noticed that Paul's shares (the guy who actually figured this out - and never wrote it up) were coming up with comments and excerpts all of a sudden. So I asked him what he was doing. In the usual google way, they added another service - Shared Stuff.

Like tumblr it was made for sharing things. I still like the convenience of being able to just click in google reader, but now I can add comments too. Because of the setup that I described in my previous post, I just added my google shared stuff link to my shared link - and now it includes all three feeds.

Amazon Unbox

I'm typically not a huge music buyer. I think part of that is that I really can't stand the time it takes to go find a song, go to the store, buy a CD, rip it, put it onto some music software, sync to a device.

Ugh.

So I'm still mostly listening to stuff that I had from 10 years ago - I purchase maybe 1 CD per year.

I liked the idea of iTunes - but couldn't really get behind it because I used multiple device - my computer runs Linux, my phone has MP3s on it, my Car has a CompactFlash card slot (which I love), and I now have an iPod Touch. But only the iPod can play M4Ps.

Well, I just tried Amazon MP3 Downloads for the first time today - because it lets me download 256kbps MP3s - for $0.89 each (or less if I get the entire album). I used their downloader to get two new albums - really really simple. I one-click shopped to download two albums, and poof! There they were in iTunes.

Plugged in my iPod and they were sync'ed - and they live as MP3s on my drive - so I can copy them to anything I want.

This is totally the way that music should be. I'll be going to Amazon for all of my music from now on.
This is both a "easy to use" and a "meets my needs" thing as well as a thing based on principal. A lot of the new music that I get I find from Pandora - and I want to send a message to the labels that making their music available without DRM is the right way to go!

Posting Media

Up until recently, I had been posting any new pictures I had at flickr, and then just expecting people to get them. That was a great idea, except it only worked for images. I've been branching out to video a little lately - I have a nice little camera that can take videos as well as pictures - so I've been using that and I'm trying to publish some of them on google video. Unfortunately that meant that people had to go look in two different places.

So in the spirit of stealing ideas from the Russell's, I finally figured out why John has been posting his pictures to flickr and also putting them up on a separate blog. Now I know.

Anyway, you can find our media over at Mike Meg and Connor's Media.