So, I'm officially living in a Comcast commercial now.

I have an Advent outdoor wireless speaker that used to be hooked up to my stereo. When we're in the backyard, especially in the pool, I used to put in five CDs and set them to play randomly. The problem was that there were always a few songs I didn't want to hear on those CDs, and invariably those played every time. My stereo can't handle MP3s, so a couple of months ago I started hooking the wireless transmitter directly to my Archos Jukebox. This really came in handy when we were on vacation at the cottage by the lake.

This setup helped to a certain degree, but it was dependent on the content I had on the Jukebox and the playlists I had set up. Finally this weekend, I wised up and hooked the transmitter up to the laptop, booted it up, and logged in to Rhapsody. I've only created a couple of playlists on the site so far, but it was great being able to call them up and listen to them on a moment's notice. As I spend more time customizing my "library" on the service, I'll have even more flexibility for parties, background music for relaxing, listening at work, kids songs, etc.

I'm getting a taste of the heavenly jukebox, and so far I really like it. The labels definitely need to keep adding content, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Instant Gratification

"It makes me feel good when people read my blog. Problem is, I never know when people visit. As a result, I'm always running my page counters up checking to see if anyone's visited. To solve this problem, I've put together a service to send out alerts via AIM whenever someone reads a blog entry.

Feel free to use the service for your own blog, as described below." [via Scripting News]

This could be way cool! I'm testing it with this entry, so we'll see how it does. If you want to tell me that you're reading my blog, enter your name and email address below. When I get the IM notification, I'll know you were here! I wonder if this works in news aggregators, too. (Sorry if it messes up the code in aggregators instead.)

Nothing Is Forever (Except TV Shows)

"In the last three years, the popularity of whole seasons of television shows on DVD has exploded, giving new life to both popular and obscure programs that, once they went off the air or ended a successful syndication run, used to be gone for good. Now pay cable channels are taking advantage of pent-up demand for popular shows like 'The Sopranos' and 'Sex and the City.' Modern classics like 'Friends' and 'The Simpsons' are almost as ubiquitous as old episodes of 'I Love Lucy....'

To be sure, the $600 million market for television shows is still dwarfed by the overall demand for DVD's of nearly $11 billion. A large part of that, industry executives say, is theatrical film releases. But according to the DVD Release Report, which tracks what DVD's are distributed, offerings of multi-disc television series increased a record 114 percent in the first seven months of 2003 over the same period last year. (DVD releases in general — including movies, music and animation — showed a 28.5 percent increase)." [New York Times, via Lost Remote, emphasis above is mine]

Note to music industry: people love old stuff and will pay to own it, even if it's being re-broadcast on [free] network television. You just have to offer it at a decent price and in a convenient format (for us, not you). Open up your back catalogs and you'll start seeing profits, too.

Vince Outlaw is thinking outside the box, wondering how to get Audible and NPR to work together to let him time- and place-shift NPR's content. It's an interesting idea, one that I hope the Audible team considers (although I know the barrier is more on the NPR side). I love the idea of NPR content waiting on my Archos Jukebox for me to listen to during my morning commute.

NPR and Audible Team Up To Provide Customized Audio To You Through Their New Weblog-enabled Affliate Service

"As I walked the Princess Del Cerro Park Loop this morning, ideas for having interesting and timely things to listen to as I walked came back into my head. I've written before about how NPR should really do a lot more to blog-enable their totally killer audio content, but I never really took it to the this level. And here I do, taking what Audible.com is doing with NPR now and turning that into a personalized, blogable, feed on content that can downloaded and listened to when I need to. Like when I'm heading out for an early morning walk or a drive to work. And enabling me to share these things via weblogging, becoming an NPR / Audible affliate. There are many more out there like me. So, here's the story...

I really want to be an Audible affiliate, selling NPR story by story content (not entire shows, which Audible already does) by listening to it and blogging it. To not get too far off the track, what's needed is a blog that can link to all of the appropriate pieces and automatically enable them to be downloaded to a computer and portable device. This is somewhat inspired by Adam Curry's recent ode to the One Page Aggregator (OPA), To Collect and Serve....

And here's where the weblog subscription results in something YOU can listen to and think about when YOU want to,

'There's a hidden gem in rss. Each entry can be accompanied by a url that points to an 'enclosure'. The idea is that an enclosure is a large media object, like an mpeg or DiVX file.

When an aggregator scans an rss signal with enclosures, it can decide to download the file in the background to your desktop or any spot on your harddrive.'

It's only one small step from having this enclosure download of the audio pieces automated so it's on the listening device of your choosing when you get out of bed and need to get that update on the world.

So, who do I need to work with / for to make this happen? Audible? NPR? Both?! Now that would be fun!" [Jazz 88 News, via Adam Curry]