If you’re into independent rock, you must use rhapsody! It has an outstanding collection of indie albums.

Here’s what rocks

1. All the music! Literally you get to listen to millions of songs whenever you want.
2. It works with your non-Ipod. You can take any of those millions of songs with you wherever you want.
3. It’s cheap. $15 a month or $10 a month (about the price of a CD a month).

It’s just a pure pleasure to use Rhapsody from the standpoint of finding and listening to music. But wait!!!

Here’s what sucks

1. Yes you get a lot of music but not all the music. If you’re into popular music, you’ll be disappointed to find out all those awesome hits you love aren’t available to listen without buying the song (just like in itunes). This is stupid and is probably the number one reason the subscription service hasn’t taken. Wake up music industry! It does have all the indie music tracks though.
2. It doesn’t work with your Ipod. I’ll chalk this one up to Apple more than Rhapsody though but the problem is still there. If your an Ipod geek, I know, it’s not Apple’s fault. Just shut up…
3. The software (web based or intalled) is sub par. Yeah it does the job but could be so much better. I imagine this is where the subscription model can really take off. It would be great if Rhapsody had better music sharing features, better profiling and suggestions, and a better overall user interface.

I’ve always been a windows user for my desktop PC ever since windows 3.0. I’ve learned that inevitably the Windows OS gets all screwed up over time and it’s time for a reinstall. Now I’m on windows XP and that time has come. I can’t delete certain files no matter what I do and other problems are cropping up causing weird crashes.

I don’t want to put Windows XP back on! I’ve been using it for a long time and it’s certainly the most stable and versatile desktop OS out there at the moment. But I’m a geek! I want the new and improved stuff.

The question this time is what next? I have a copy of Vista and have tried it. It SUCKS! I’m a big fan of Linux and love it’s simplicity as a server OS. I’ve even setup Linux but it still feels light years behind when I try to use it for a Desktop (Kubuntu isn’t bad but still it doesn’t just work! I could write a whole post about the stupid stuff in a default install of Kubuntu). Apple certainly has really cool stuff. They look sexy and they’re new but they are the antithesis to my core beliefs. Most notably they aren’t open to any hardware but their own and like to control other aspects of my purchasing decisions such as MP3 player choices.

Edit: So in the end I just reinstalled windows XP and am very happy with the decision. I figured picking another OS wasn’t worth the time in the end.

I’ve noticed at work that Vista and Firefox play horribly together. On several installs of Vista with Firefox 2, Firefox loads some websites very slowly. You can open IE and load the same website in a snap.

Naturally any normal user just wouldn’t deal with that problem and switch right over to IE. Microsoft gets more users back on IE quite simply like this. Fortunately for the geekier users out there, a quick search for “Firefox Slow Vista” reveals the remedy. Checkout Rob Garret’s site which is the top match in Google for how to fix the problem.

Apparently something called auto-tuning is what causes the problem. Doesn’t that sound a little backwards? Auto-tuning sounds like something that should be helping not hurting Firefox. I have no clue what auto-tuning is and don’t really care what it does as long as Firefox works. I do however wonder if this was a purposeful “problem”.

Web based tools should be important to anyone who spends most of their lives “connected.” For me, it is important to keep as much of what I do as possible online. It just makes life easier when I use machines other then my own. Even setting up a new machine is a lot easier since so few tools need to be installed. Most of the tools I need and use regularly can all be found on one website or another. So it wasn’t long till I realized my bookmarks should be as accessible and online with everything else.

del.icio.us fits the bill perfectly. I wanted to see if there was anything better out there and found a lot. But the only other one that stood out as simple and as useful was Google Bookmarks. So naturally I had to do a shoot out between the two. I spent a few days bookmarking in both tools to see which one came out on top.

Both del.icio.us and Google Bookmark are nearly identical in tagging pages. They both provide easy bookmarking directly from the web browser. del.icio.us even goes so far as to have a nice plugin for Firefox which adds del.icio.us to the search bar, provides a tagging button, a link to your bookmarks in your menu, a del.icio.us toolbar menu, and tagging from context menus. This doesn’t really set del.icio.us apart from Google but it does provide for a more streamlined setup with access to a lot more then just tagging pages.

If you compare the pages used to bookmark/tag a web page, they look almost identical.

At this point It’s rather difficult to see which product provides any advantages. So let’s take a look at how to access bookmarked pages from the respective website. Google hands down has the superior looking layout. It’s simple, organized, and quick to adapt to. del.icio.us doesn’t really give that same feeling. But it’s not bad.

Searching

The key in using either of these tools is in the tagging (Google calls theirs labels but they act just like tags.) We can bookmark hundreds of pages but finding them later is the problem and that’s where tags help. The other important aspect to finding bookmarks is searching. Google naturally provides superior searching of bookmarks compared to del.icio.us. That’s what they try to be best at after all. The main reason I say this is Google indexes everything about the bookmark. So if you do a search it can match anything having to do with the bookmark such as label, title, note etc… del.icio.us on the other hand, only provides searching for tags. This is not bad but it’s not great. It just emphasizes the importance of good tagging when using del.icio.us. If you use a bad tag that doesn’t relate well to the link you might be out of luck.

Why I picked del.icio.us

There are two reasons why del.icio.us has won my vote. The first is that the community can contribute to del.icio.us and help each other. The second is that everything that del.icio.us has at stake is in web based bookmarking/tagging. Google has a several (at least!) projects to worry about.

The community factor helps give del.icio.us a giant boost. You can label bookmarks for friends. This is handy for showing a buddy a page you are interested in without calling him up and forcing him to take a look immediatley. It just shows up in a section called, “links for you” which really means links for you from other people. You can also add your friends entire list of bookmarks to your network. So if they are willing to share you can see all the pages they are interested in. Finally you can run a search for items from the whole del.icio.us community. The relevancy of these searches is through how often pages are bookmarked rather then some other algorithim. It seems to work really well so far. I’m sure I am missing a few other cool collaborative features and it looks like they are working on more.

Google has a lot going on. del.icio.us is built around one product for now. This makes a compelling argument for del.icio.us. For instance there isn’t even a sign of the ability to share bookmarks in Google while del.icio.us is continually improving their own service. That’s all they got to work on and it’s as simple as that. While there may be a team dedicated to Google Bookmark I doubt the company’s success is hinging on that product. Some may argue del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo. But I have yet to see a Yahoo logo on the del.icio.us site. Looks like Yahoo is doing the right thing and letting del.icio.us maintain its autonomy.

Check them both out at:

http://www.google.com/bookmarks/

http://del.icio.us/

Also please comment and let me know about anything I’ve missed.

TiEcon 2006 was a show not to be missed. TiE stands for The Indus Entrepreneur. Being Indian however is not a requirement for attendees and if you are shy you shouldn’t be. The atmosphere was very welcoming and open. It was even a good opportunity for some cultural exposure.

Excellent speakers included John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Guy Kawasaki, Sashi Tharoor, and Larry Brilliant. Topics not only covered entrepreneurship but world affairs such as poverty, health, and environment. My personal favorite was Guy Kawasaki. The most entertaining speaker of the show with some of the best advice.

Networking was an important theme for the show as well. Plenty of people were buzzing around with smiles ready to engage in conversation. This show is mandatory for anyone who would like to meet fellow entrepreneurs and people who can help each other.

I will be attending next year after this great experience and I recommend this event to anyone who would like industry exposure or has interest in entrepreneurship. If you have any questions, please email me and I would be more then happy to provide additional info.

For show details visit the website at http://www.tiecon.org/