Absolutely no opinions from me.. just some food for thought.

Download (MP3, 21MB)

Post opinions, or don’t. Just listen and be sure to form your own opinions.

There is an excellent article over at fortymedia that points out the top 10 major stock photography cliches.

Check it out here.

Now, as someone who has to deal with business websites. Especially the hosting area. I am quite intimate with each and every one of these cliches. It has to be said that, the original sites to use these really were brilliant. They all convey a point to the reader in one abstract way or another. That is why they are so cliche in the first place.

But now we are at this point where they are just over used and tired. But the question is, do we as business people continue to use them because they convert well (and they do), or do we stop using them because our peers laugh when they see them.

Just a side note, you’ll notice that the image used in the forty media masthead is striking, effective, and above all unique. (Note that today, it is what I assume to be arlington national cemetary. Great way to respect memorial day but be sure to check back tomorrow for the usual fare.) Too bad we can’t all be so creative, becuase I know I’ll probably end up coming back to the same cliches in the next site I have a hand in launching.

Want to find new music? Want to keep that new music? Sans-DRM. For free? With titles, ID3, and folder structure entact?

Sure. Use Pandora. Psssh. Old news right? Sure, but now you can download the songs. Granted, I am sure this is entirely illegal but hey, what can you do?

Just head on over to hak5, download Pandora’s Jar, sign up at pandora if you haven’t already, navigate to http://localhost in firefox, and download to your heart’s content.

And the kicker folks? It will even post it to your LastFM.

Enjoy.

Canvas for wordpress has been released. I’m not sure for how long but I just found it so it’s new to me.

Surely to change blogging as we know it, canvas makes the claim that you can have a highly customized enhanced wordpress copy ready for use in minutes, without touching a line of code.

Although I think contributions like this are wonderful, stuff like this worries me. Blogging is already too easy, what happens when we make it so people can be blogging right out of the womb?

Regardless, this is a tool that will come in handy for the less “in the know” blogger. So use it if you need it. It’s there.

So the Motorola Q is out for review. And PC Mag scooped it up and delivered.

The Q is indeed RAZR thin, elegant, and apparently functional. And I want it. I am and always will be a RAZR naysayer. I just don’t like them. I like the thin, don’t get me wrong, I myself have an A900 but the RAZR is an entirely overrated phone.

The Q however looks great and functions well. Something that is lacking in the smartphone market. They are either clunky and as portable as a rock in your pocket, or they are very very buggy.

Just note that the Q outright Stole it’s keypad design from the treo. I guess they can’t be innovative 100% of the time.

Full article here.

Reed Hastings (CEO of The Online DVD Rental shop; Netflix) has announced that Netflix does have plans to roll out movie downloads by the end of the year. Ever the optimist, he is firm in his belief that downloads will be small potatos compared to actuall DVD rentals for a long long time, stating that “DVD will dominate for a decade of more”.

Do I agree? Hell no. DVD will be strong for a long time because as of now, you can pop it into the ol’ DVD player and watch in the living room. But it will not be a decade before even grandma is streaming High Def movies from her laptop to her TV.

Whatever the outcome, Netflix is going to do downloads. And that’s cool.

Apple is suing Creative for no less than four counts of patent infringement. Why? Who knows. Other than the fact that the new Zen Vision:M looks an aweful lot like an iPod. Though I am not sure that is a patent issue.

Not to be bested, the same day Creative decides to file a trade complaint against Apple.

If you think this goes nowhere, raise your hand. You too?

Bottom line: The iPod holds so much of the U.S. market, and the brand is so stamped into our culture, no matter how close creative can match the iPod in design it just won’t compete. So give the lawyers a break Apple. You know they have Zen Visions, right?

Yahoo! unveils their new video searching service.

Yahoo! Video search allows you to search for video anywhere. Any kind of video. It looks like an amazing service.

I’ll be interested in seeing if they decide to start letting us tag videos. Or something Web 2.0 for god’s sake. The site is so 1999.

Well.. sort of. The mockups for Shuttle have been submitted to Matt Mullenweg and he has said they will be incorporated into future releases. Of course, now that the project is out of the Shuttle team’s hands we can only guess as to when this will be pushed to the public.

Shuttle has turned out to be a functionality improvement, not just an aesthetic improvement. Wordpress has always lacked a polished and finished backend. It is obviously designed by developers. It serves it’s function, but this new backend will go a long way towards the proliferation of Wordpress as a corporate tool. (nudge nudge rundle).

Mockups can be found here and the full writeup by Khaled is linked to in the first sentence of this post.

Fear not my faithful readers. I haven’t forgotten about the site. I have just been busy as hell. A few interesting twists of fate left me with no theme (migrating data from desktop to laptop) but I have completely rewrote the new design from scratch and it will be up tonight. I kind of took a break and ordered a pizza a few minutes ago. Because I am lazy, but it will be done tonight. Along with a real post, which I have been working on for about 2 weeks.