Well…iTunes if officially in trouble.

As some of you may have heard by now, Yahoo released it’s own music service to compete with iTunes, Naptster, and Rhapsody. I decided to give it a try about an hour ago. So far, I am extremely impressed. The layout of the program isn’t perfect, but it just came out, so there hopefully will be improvements to come. The major draw- the price. For a monthly subscribtion, unlimited downloads, it’s $6.99. If you pay yearly it drops to $4.99. How they are doing this for such a low price, I have no idea. The bad news is that all of your music is completely locked down with digital rights management (DRM). You can’t do much of anything without Yahoo’s permission…so once you stop paying the 6.99 a month you’ll loose all of the music you’ve been storing up. But as long as the price stays this low (and it’s pretty much guaranteed for atleast a year), they are going to have themselves a winner here. All those artists you’ve wanted to check out, but didn’t want to pay to listen…you can now do it! a great idea for the musical pioneers…

not without it’s negatives…but it’s pretty nice. name a song, download it and listen to it minutes later…all for just $7 a month. pretty slick.

PS: if you like acoustic-Christian music…check out Shawn McDonald.

If you’re on the web a lot, you are probably one of the millions who is into “instant messaging”. While I don’t chat like I used to back in my high school or college days, I still like to keep in contact with some old friends (not to mention current friends). When I first started, I used ICQ…then it was onto AOL IM…and then Microsoft Messenger. Well, having all of those windows open is just a pain so I investigated a few different progams until one day I found the perfect solution- Trillian. Put simply, Trillian is one program that runs all of the other messenger clients. You can have one contact list with your contacts from AOL, MS, ICQ, and Yahoo… It’s a pretty simple idea, but sometimes it’s these small ideas that can be so profound. I loaded this baby a year or two ago and haven’t loooked back since. Give it a shot and you might do the same.

Trillian (download.com)

for those of you with a Mac, a similar program

Adium (download.com)

PS: my contact info – AOL: dkendall77 MSM: dkendall77@hotmail.com Yahoo: dkendall77 ICQ: 2814665

For those of you that don’t know or don’t use RSS feeds, this post is for you (yes, even including you, Jen).

If you look down on the right hand side of this page you’ll see a few little link boxes. In fact, if you look around to many news based pages or blogs you’ll probably see a lot of little links similar to these. So, what is RSS you might be asking. Well…Wikipedia says it this way: RSS is used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. Get that? It’s somewhat confusing in those terms so i’ll try to use some analogies to make it seem simpler.

Think of something like Headline News. They give you the world’s news in just 30 minutes, where as CNN, Foxnews, MSNBC and such give you twenty four hour coverage. Well, you could sit through and listen to hours of talking, advertisements and stupid marketing gimics, or you could just turn on Headline News and get the same thing in a fraction of the time. An RSS feed is kind of like that, but more advanced. You create “live bookmarks” for all your favorite pages (ie silentfool.com). And then when you wake up in the morning, instead of going to each individual page to see if there are updates you can just bring up your RSS reader, click “update” and it will hightlight all of the new stories/blogs/etc. Your RSS reader will then allow you to browse through the text without having to load any graphics or advertisements…you can just get the “meat”. And if you want to read more or actually check out the “real” page, you can just click on the supplied link and you’re there. It’s a extremely efficient way to absorb a ton of information in as little time as possible.

That’s a basic rundown of it. I hope I didn’t confuse anyone too much. If you’d like to read a little more here’s a link to Wikipedia: RSS Feeds

Also you might want to check out: Bloglines
although, I personally prefer Sage (Mozilla Firefox required)

Some of my favorite feeds:
Michelle Malkin
Slashdot
digg
Engadget
loveforaliar(needs to update more!)

Will Apple’s Stop making iPods?
Here’s an interesting little article (which is linked to the original) about how Apple may just be getting out of the iPod business. Seems crazy at first since it’s their big seller, which has moved them from an unknown future to where they are today, but after you think about it…it could just happen. If you read Orrin’s comment to the post below, he pretty much nails it right on the head…the reason the iPod is so popular it seems, is because of iTunes. With the competition heating up everyday and the prices dropping, Apple is either going to follow suite and drop those profit margins or get out of the iPod (hardware) business altogether.