Changing Way

Do you want to win a HP HDX Dragon Entertainment Notebook? There is, or has been, a chance to do so every day this month, thanks to HP, its 31 Days of the Dragon promotion, and the participating web sites. Each day, a different site hosts a contest.

Today it’s the turn of last100. To enter, leave a comment there (not here, I have no prizes to give out) “listing your top five digital lifestyle products and/or services.”

I found it difficult to pick just five. Then I reflected that there are satisfactory substitutes for many of the products and services I use. For example, I use Google search and Reader a lot, but wouldn’t be too upset if I had to switch to competing products.

In contrast, here are five products to which I’m attached in one way or another.

• WordPress: this blog lives at WordPress.com.
• Rhapsody streaming music.
• Flickr: here’s my photostream (or at least the public part of it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog or its feed, and like looking at photos of kids, please drop me an email).
• Canon PowerShot A540 6MP Digital Camera.
• Sandisk Sansa Clip 1GB MP3 player.

Each of the first three is a software product for which I pay, even in this age of free stuff. For example, I have a Pro account at Flickr. That is of course where the photo lives. It shows the Sansa clip, along with its friends, the ridiculously good value Koss KSC75 headphones.

The chopstick-wielding manga character is Johnny Bunko. He’s about to get some career advice.

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is: a book on careers; a blog; the work of Dan Pink (writer) and Rob Ten Pas (artist). I’ve read, and highly recommend, one of Dan’s previous books: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.

The blog/site for the book has a WTF? page rather than an FAQ page. One of the question and answer pairs is “Why write a career guide in manga?” and:

… What they want in a book, or so people tell me, are what they can’t get from Google. They want strategic lessons – and they want it presented in an accessible, to-the-point way… You can read this book in an hour.

Now for some fancy multimedia stuff. There is a widget, but the WordPress.com version doesn’t seem to work. It turned up in the original version of this post as a link to the widget page at ClearSpring and a link to the book site. But I can embed the video trailer.

Yet another artist to whom my attention has been Drawn! is Natalie Kocsis. Most of the work in her portfolio is less cute and more grotesque than Lucy here, as the example at Drawn! shows.

A nerdy aside: one of the ways in which the WordPress.com interface changed recently was in the way we can include images in posts. This thumbnail is generated by WordPress. It’s rather smaller than I like images in posts to be, but the medium size image generated is rather larger (400 rather than 128 rather than the just-right 240 of the small image size at Flickr).

Fred Wilson puts the difference at $14.8B - if we take “the publicly available information about the most recent financings of the two companies ($15bn for Facebook and $200mm for Automattic)” to provide good measures of the respective company’s values. But Fred isn’t any more impressed with that measurement that I am.

I think that some aspects of Fred’s post could use clarification. I’ll continue the job of clarification started in a comment by Jeff Jarvis. I’ll also plug some of my own writing about WordPress.

After quoting the funny money numbers, Fred moves on to a chart of unique visitors to Facebook and to “WordPress.” Jeff’s clarification is that the WordPress line in that chart almost certainly refers to the site WordPress.com, and that many WordPress blogs are hosted elsewhere. Jeff also remarks that WordPress is a platform, not a social network.

We need to be clear about three different but related entities.

• WordPress is free/open source software. It can be downloaded from WordPress.org.
• Automattic is the privately-held firm founded by Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress.
• WordPress.com is a host for WordPress blogs. It is owned by Automattic; it is not the firm’s only project.

Comparing unique visitors at Facebook.com and at WordPress.com is comparing an apple with an orange. Automattic has other oranges in its bag, and hence has other revenue streams. If we want to compare the $ values of Facebook and Automattic, we should look at all the oranges in Automattic’s bag, and not just at WordPress.com.

Having noted the clarification in Jeff’s comment, I’d like to follow up on another statement from the same comment: “WordPress is not a network. WordPress is a platform.” That’s mostly true, but it ignores a couple of important points.

First, WordPress has several of the ingredients of a social network. Consider, for example, Diso: “an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of… social networking concepts… first target is WordPress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.” I’ve added emphasis to show that Chris Messina and his buddies consider WordPress a good starting point for an open, standards-based social network.

Second, WordPress.com has several network-like features. Once signed on to WordPress.com, you can leave comments on other blogs hosted there (including this one) without having to provide further identity. There are WordPress.com-wide tag and category pages; as an example, here’s the page for the tag automattic.

One of the things that makes Automattic interesting is that it’s in the business of making money from free software. If you share my interest in this aspect of Automattic, you might want to check out my series of posts on it. It starts with this introduction. The most successful post in the series (indeed, on this blog) is the one on making money from WordPress.com.

I don’t attempt to put a $ value on Automattic. I am convinced that its $ value does not lag that of Facebook by many billions of dollars. I think that Fred Wilson shares my conviction. I wonder if he attempted to get his VC firm, Union Square Ventures, a piece of the Automattic action. Earlier this year, Automattic got a $29.5M round of funding.

Most of the time I play music these days, it’s on a PC. That sometimes means lousy built-in laptop speakers. So it was time to get something that plays the music through our stereo.

That turned out to be the Creative Labs Xmod Wireless Music System. It arrived last week, packed well enough to survive some rough handling before it got to us.

So far, I’m pleased with it, without being blown away. It is very quick and simple to set up. There’s no software to install, just a transmitter box that connects to the PC by USB and a receiver box that plugs in to the back of the amplifier. The receiver also needs to be plugged in for power. All cables are supplied.

There are some quibbles, but they’re not sufficient for me to wish I’d lashed out the extra for the Squeezebox or Sonos. For example, the music is delivered to the amp at low volume, so that I need to turn it up higher than for any other input. But for less than $100 delivered, this is good value.

Every now and again, I see something about how old physical media, such as paper, will outlast newer media, such as the disc that this post will be stored on. There was such an article in yesterday’s Boston Globe.

The confusing thing is that digital memory offers the illusion of permanence. Even when people would like to see a file disappear, for instance, delete just doesn’t seem to last forever - whether it is on social networks like Facebook, or e-mails or text messages that surface years later.

The article refers to services to convert analog music to digital. I shed my last vinyl records the last time I moved, a few years ago. Next time I move, it’ll be time to shed my cassette tapes.

The ones I took care to keep during the last move are the tapes of Richard Thompson live shows. Perhaps I should convert them to digital. But I haven’t played them in years, and I can probably find the same or similar stuff on the web.

By the way, I read the Globe article on paper, and I paid money for it. And some of you were thinking that owning cassette tapes marked me as a dinosaur…

Clinton looked at me for a moment… and said, “I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”

It was actually Bill, although recent events might lead you to think that it was Hillary, or that Macbeth is about the Lady of the family.

The problem with the money-saving scheme described in the subject line is that you need to have an almost-dead laptop with a 70 GB drive. Well, I did.

So I bought a disk enclosure, opened up the laptop, pulled out the hard drive, plugged the drive in to the enclosure, connected the now-external drive into a USB port, and saw that the drive in question was a 70GB. It was very easy. Thanks to:

• The many sources of $10 disk enclosures.
• Prime Electronic Components, who sent the enclosure right away.
• Microsoft Windows, which recognized the external drive right away, with no need to quibble about drivers, ports, etc.

Some of us come out of the episode with more mixed reviews. FedEx got confused because I combined my work address with my home zip code, and that cost us a couple of days. The Cirago Mobile Storage USB 2.0 Hard drive enclosure is rather shoddy. The scary thing is that I chose it in part because it lists for $15 (and was on sale for less). I dread to think what the enclosures that list for less than $10 are like.

The dying laptop was bought, reconditioned, from Dell. It wasn’t in particularly good condition when I first got it.

But the hard drive lives on. I plan to make it my music drive, and, with 70GB, it can handle the job pretty well.

… I would give it to Clinton. So I just asserted at Reddit.

The web isn’t short of stuff about Getting Things Done (GTD). For a recent example, or a starting point, you could do worse by this post by Merlin Mann at 43 Folders.

But for many of us, GTD is a lot less relevant than PTO (Putting Things Off). That’s one of the reasons why I created a PTO site. I’m pleased to say that I got the URL iamdis.org.

Another reason, and perhaps a better reason, to set up the site is that I wanted to play around with Google Sites. That aspect of the site deserves its own post. But feel free to relax at this post, while Sandy Denny sings you some PTO-appropriate music.