To me, the most interesting thing that was unveiled during the last Apple event was iTunes 9, particularly the Genius Mixes.  I tried them out as soon as I could, and I was really impressed.  iTunes can now scan all my music, find the 12 main types of music I listen to, and put them into newly generated playlists.  It’s all very Apple – these mixes do something very complex yet give the user the impression that it’s the easiest thing in the world to do.  There are no settings or customization offered with these mixes at all.  They just exist on your iTunes, and they work.

Genius Mixes perfectly illustrate why people who buy Apple products tend to become die-hard Apple fans and why Apple is doing so insanely well as a company. Apple is extremely good at adding value to the products you buy from them over the lifetime of that product.  And every time Apple bumps up this value, they usually offer something new you can buy that can make this experience even BETTER!

My experience with Genius Mixes certainly showed me this – and I can only assume others would have similar testimonies.  Prior to iTunes 9, my iTunes music had been governed by select playlists.  So like, since 2002 I was the sole mind behind my music collection organization.  But when I started listening these Genius Mixes, I kept hearing songs that I hadn’t listened to in ages.  There are a number of reasons for this: I might have stopped listening to certain tunes because I actively disliked them.  I could have forgotten to rate them, and since my playlists are largely based on song ratings they were banished from my playlists altogether.  I might have decided that I was tired of certain albums, unchecked them so they would not be included in my playlists, and then forgot about them.  By throwing seven years worth of neglected music into my face, Genius Mixes showed me that my iTunes music collection was way sloppier than I thought it was.

To rectify this, I found and deleted all the music that I simply did not like, I rated songs that had no ratings, and I reevaluated all songs that were unchecked to see if I felt like listening to them again.  As a result, I had an iTunes library that was more organized, more functional, and better than it was before the iTunes 9 update.  Then, after deleting about 10 gigs of tunes off my hard drive, I ended up downloading about 10 new albums.  Of course, I didn’t feel like paying for all of that music, so I yanked 8 out of 10 of those out of bit torrent land.  However, I did end up buying two of them from iTunes.  That is money I would not have given Apple if Genius Mixes hadn’t made me value my music library more than ever.

iTunes is not the only product that Apple makes that gets better with age and really good cheap upgrades.  Snow Leopard was very inexpensive and made me love my Mac more.  The latest OS update to my iPod Touch made me like the device more than ever, which in turn got me to buy even more apps for my Touch.  And the apps themselves illustrate this extremely well, particularly the games.  You buy a game once, and all the many fun updates from then on are free.

In these examples, Apple manages to make people think they are getting things for free or very cheap when they are really not.  They make a low profit on these new additions so that you will enjoy what you have already paid for more.  This in turn boosts your desire to buy from Apple more of what you already have, be it music, videos, applications, and eventually another Mac.  Apple wasn’t the first company to adopt this model, of course.  Netflix’s Watch Instantly service adds a lot of value to the monthly subscription fees its customers pay for DVD rentals, and it will gradually add even more value as more content becomes available.  I’m even now thinking about going out and buying a Ruku player.  Most of Google’s services are free and get better with each update.  And of course the more I use Google services, the more likely I’ll click on their ads.  Apple has borrowed a business model usually reserved for companies mainly selling information goods and expanded it to the sale of its physical goods as well as information goods.

[And here's the obligatory attack on Microsoft]  Most of Apple’s competitors, like, ohhhh, Microsoft, can’t easily compete with this.  Microsoft makes a lot of its money from people purchasing upgrades to its products.  Unlike Apple’s, their software upgrades are usually not a means of getting customers to buy into another revenue stream.  This makes its customers (individuals, computer makers, large companies) reluctant to upgrade, so they force them using various tactics.  This is an old and annoying business model that consumers are increasingly rejecting.  Apple really does “think different”, and it’s making them a hell of a lot of money.  People should pay attention.

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When I began this blog, my main intent was to write.  As such, I was concerned with finding a free way to get my blog up and running (detailed in a previous post).  WordPress.com was my answer, and it offers a great way create a blog quickly and easily.  Despite this, small issues quickly came up that bugged me enough to switch to using wordpress.org software hosted on a remote server with my own domain and gain more control over my blog.

First, I realized WordPress.com did not let me change any aspect of the blog template I chose at the site without paying $15 a year to be able to customize the CSS in the template.  Second, I started to notice and desire things to add to my blog – like the addtoany.com button you can see at the bottom of this post.  WordPress.com blogs offer relatively few options for adding small customizations like this to blog postings.  Eventually I figured out that there is a way to do this, but it is definitely a workaround and not too convenient.  There are many beautifully designed blogs which say they are made with WordPress, but I knew I couldn’t recreate these blogs with my WordPress.com account.

And therein lies the big difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.  If you go to WordPress.org, you can freely download the open source WordPress blogging software that can be installed on a your own computer (local install) or on a hosted/remote server.  (And actually, most good web hosting services will install WordPress automatically, so there is no need to download the software from wordpress.org).  Editing your blog using WordPress software installed on your own web site gives you MUCH more control over the design of your blog.  Here are the steps I went through to get my own domain and server space:

1. First, I went to WordPress.org and found the online installation manual for hosting my own installation of WordPress.
2. Following its advice, I next chose a web hosting site to buy my own domain and remote server space.  There are a gajillion web hosting places out there, but because of my inexperience in this area, I looked for one that was recommended by WordPress, cheap, and could install WordPress onto my purchased server space itself.  It turns out that most quality hosting services cost between $5 and $7 a month, and most will install WordPress for you.  So I chose justhost.com, and I ended up paying $71 for a year of web hosting with all the features and space I’ll need for my little blog.
3. After following the instructions from JustHost and getting my domain squared away and ready, I clicked on the “install WordPress” button in my domain’s control panel (cPanel), and went through the three steps to get WordPress installed.

After this, I went to my brand new blank blog and started the process of moving my old blog into its new space.

1. First, in my old wordpress.com blog dashboard, I selected “export” under the Tools tab on the left of the page.  This allowed me to export posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags and put them into a WordPress export file to be saved on my computer.
2. Next, in my new WordPress blog dashboard (which is very similar to the old wordpress.com dashboard), I selected “Import” under the Tools tab on the left of the page.  This takes you to a page that gives you many (there are 15) options for importing data into your WordPress blog.  Clicking on the “WordPress” option let me import all the data in my saved export file from my old WordPress blog into my new blog.
3. After this, I just had to import the links I had saved in the “Links” tab in my old wordpress.com blog dashboard.  To do this, I clicked the “blogroll” option in the “Import” section of my new blog, which prompted me to either upload a file I could have saved on my computer containing my old links data, or to specify an OPML url.  I did the latter, and typed in http://www.[the name of my old blog].wordpress.com/wp-links-opml.php.  Bingo – all the data from my old blog was now in my new one.

Next, I went about rebuilding my blog.  First I had to find a new theme.

1. While I was pretty happy with my old theme, there are a lot more themes to choose from in the wordpress.org community, so my eye wandered a bit.  After finding one I wanted, I installed it, activated it, and then I was free to tweek the colors, text attributes, and pretty much anything else using the theme editor found under the “Appearance” tab in the dashboard.
   • Incidentally, I figured out that I could actually install the theme I was using for the old blog even though I couldn’t find it using the native theme search function in the WordPress dashboard.  After finding it on the web, I was able to freely download it and then manually upload it into the wordpress software stored on the remote server that holds all my blog data.  To do this, I needed to download the robust (and free) File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client Cyberduck.  PC users, check out FileZilla.  Even though you could probably live in your WordPress world without ever using an FTP client, its a good idea to figure out how to use one – it’s really easy.  These are what allow you to upload and/or manage files that are housed on your website.  Following the installation directions on the site where I downloaded the theme, I unzipped the file that enclosed the theme data and placed it into the wp-content/themes directory using my FTP client.  This directory was located here: root directory > public_html > wp-content > themes.
   • Another occasion I had to use this happened when I first tried to install WordPress from the hosting site.  It initially wouldn’t let me install it at www.thingsfromtom.com because there was already data in the root directory of my website.  It instead wanted me to install it in another directory, which would have given my blog a url of “www.thingsfromtom.com/techblog” or something.  So I opened up Cyberduck, connected to my website, and deleted the contents in the public_html folder.  (This was just the webpage that justhost.com created as a default location for when people land on www.thingsfromtom.com before I designed any content.)
2. With the theme all set up, all I had left to do was fiddle around with the widgets and plugins in my blog.  (Plugins can be modified from the “Plugins” tab on the left of the WordPress dashboard, and widgets are located under the “Appearance” tab.  There is NO Plugins tab in the wordpress.com dashboard.)  This process is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t get into how these are installed and edited here.  But I will say that plugins are what make putting your blog on your own website and editing the design using the WordPress software totally worth it.

Wow.  That was long.  But I hope it helps anyone who is considering breaking from wordpress.com and taking more control of their blog.  It really isn’t that hard, you get a lot more flexibility in your blog’s design, and you end up with your own domain to which you can design and add other web pages.  Having a website these days is a terrific marketing tool and a great way to learn a skill that can’t hurt anyone in today’s gawd-awful job market.

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1. Why I chose WordPress.com

I’m sure you know the kind of people this post is directed to – the annoying, snobby, elitist people who refuse to join Facebook. And if you are in this group, most of your friends think you are annoying, snobby, and elitist. All you anti-Facebookers need to get off your high horses and discover why Facebook is a great tool.

The dumb stuff I hear from these web 2.0 poo-pooing people includes:

1. I don’t have the time or patience for setting up ANOTHER online profile;
2. I’m afraid I won’t have many friends to connect with;
3. Facebook is a stupid waste of time;
4. Anything of importance that I can do on Facebook I can do though email or the phone;
5. Facebook is just a fad, like Friendster (and MySpace. Snap.);
6. I don’t wanna bother putting up little status updates, nor would I care about all the mundane crap that my various Facebook “friends” do all day.

But I know where these folks are coming from. The only reason why I joined Facebook in the first place is that my last job made me…which of course is ironic, considering how much time I subsquentely wasted on it during work hours. The only real prior experience I had with social networking sites ended with a really ugly MySpace page containing a bunch of media plug-ins that never worked. Like this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. (I think that last one is purposefully annoying, but still, creating a page that awful should not be possible.)

Once I started, Facebook was easy to like. Setting up a new account is made as easy as possible, the user interface is extremely intuitive and attractive, and…it has games on it! With which I quickly got bored. Oh, and my fear that I wouldn’t have any Facebook friends was thankfully proved false. Facebook has some amazing tools that helped me find people I knew that were dying to welcome me to their fun cult.

I think the real reason for Facebook’s popularity is that it facilitates more productive relationships with others in your social circles. First, as more and more information becomes digitized and searchable, Facebook is a terrific way to efficiently share information you find interesting with others that have your same interests. If you like to surf, it’s easy to post a link on your Facebook page about the bitchin’ surf board shop you found in Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa; this link will then pop up on all your friends pages, and more than likely some of them will find it useful. And in turn you benefit from your friend’s postings as more and more of them join and connect with you.

But the most important thing I discovered about the site came from reading my friend’s “mundane” status updates. This is actually an extremely effective way to keep in touch with a large number of people on a personal, and even professional, level. I have nurtured many languishing friendships by simply posting a comment or two on a friend’s status update about their new cat or bad customer service experience. The argument that social networking sites are making us value “real” friendships less is absurd. And usually voiced by grumpy old fossils.

So drink deep. Everybody else is doing it.

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Honestly, I didn’t put a lot of thought into which hosted blogging service to choose.  I just knew it had to be two things: free (I know what that means) and good (not exactly sure what that means).  In the quick research I did, I found:

Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Yahoo 360, LiveJournal.com, a dumb ‘ol AOL service, and a dumb ‘ol Microsoft service.  The rest I’d never really heard of, and I figured one of these would do the trick.

I’ve played around with Blogger in the past when I helped design the Fox Net Impact Blog for school.  It worked well, but I always felt like it was going to freeze or stop working when I was editing the layout of my page.  It was especially frustrating when trying to add “Gadgets” – the little boxes of information to the right and/or left of the main blog content that holds links, external calendars, etc.  The blog was eventually finished and it turned out fine, but it wasn’t quite as effortless as the service was trying to be.

So, I first found this site – a review of the ten most popular blogging sites out there.  This review favored WordPress.com over all others.  Then I read this blog post that compares WordPress vs LiveJournal vs Blogger.  The post is very helpful and detailed, and again, made a good case for WordPress.

I didn’t consider the other ones because I’m not a Yahoo fan, I think Microsoft and AOL make crappy products, and I got tired of looking.  The fact is, they all provide the same basic service, which is all I need right now.

WordPress offers me a lot of options, most of which I have yet to explore.  But from what was written in the links I have mentioned and from my initial experience with the product, I think I chose wisely.

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1. My excellent adventure from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for a while, but I could never decide what to write about.  Nor have I ever had any really compelling reasons to put in the effort if I did think of a good blog theme.

But then I thought:

1 – I’m an MBA student who will graduate in a year, and a blog would give me a great way to express myself to potential employers who don’t know me at all.

2 – I spend HOURS in front of my computer reading about the latest and greatest internet tools being created every day.  I try to talk about these things with non-dork friends, and they look at me funny.  Now I can just invite them to read my blog if they want to know more about things like….blogs.  Or caffeinated Google search results.

3 – A blog will give me a great way to organize all my interesting Internet finds into one place, so I can look them up later.

Ultimately, I want this blog to be a testimony to my hatred of paper.  More specifically, to my manic sprint to a life where EVERYTHING I do, write, read, and (perhaps) say will be translated into 1′s and 0′s, stored on an unfathomable number of computers around the world, and instantly accessible from my MacBook.

Oh, and James Cameron and George Orwell are full of crap.

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