I was only told I was a finalist in the Network2.tv "How Do You Watch Internet TV" contest - I assumed I was 3rd place, just because I did :P

So I drove up with Amanda to the VON expo in San Jose, Chris Brogan made sure we got in and were comfortable.

Jeff Pulver begins to talk about the winners and he names off 3rd place... and it isn't me. And my heart begins to pound out of my chest. And it's strange cause it goes by very, very fast in the video, but I remember the time between him announcing 3rd place and 2nd place, was an eternity. When he said someone else's name for 2nd... my whole world started spinning.



Amanda (who is filming the second half of this video) was so excited she kinda forgot to pay attention to what she was filming... hence, I don't quite make it into frame the whole time.

When I wave to the crowd, I was waving at Clintus who shouted from off stage :)

After I walked off stage in shock, people were laughing cause I didn't know where to sit because the check was so large. I ended up finding a chair off to the side, and siting there in a daze wondering what the hell just happened.

This vlog took me a few days to get off my camera because my iPhoto crapped out on me - and my DS1000 doesn't mount to my desktop like a drive when you connect it... so I kept trying different app's and nothing seemed to want to work. But *finally* I prevailed. Okay, enough stalling, here it is:

I love iTunes. And although I realize my library isn't *that* impressive (compared to some) at 5,382 songs - it's still always on and playing music, movies, and podcast for me.

There are a few tiny changes though that I would love to see, mostly things I'm surprised don't already exist. Let's go with the visual stuff first:

1) Movie Artwork: I think it's strange (and maybe I've just been doing something wrong all this time) that for movies, you can right-click and get the info, and even go to a tab titled "artwork", from there, it let's you choose a file to represent the movie in coverflow, *but* when you click "done"; it doesn't change. And the file you just picked isn't under the "artwork" tab the next time you open the info again. Now even if there is a work around for picking your own artwork for movies - I shouldn't have to do any of this in an application from Apple.



Above I have a screen-capture of some of the movies I have in iTunes (with album view), I think the artwork for the Bunny Love pilot is fine the way it is, and I like the frame iTunes automatically choose for Steven Colbert's 'Charlene' music video, but both 'Days of Heaven' and 'Dick in a Box' are bad frames. Why can't I simply, click on "get info" for 'Days of Heaven', and under the "artwork" tab, slide a scrubber that previews the file, find a frame I like, and hit "done"?

2) Making Artwork Look More Uniform: On a side note, with movie files in coverflow, am I the only one anal enough to wish that the height of the movie picture was the same height as a song's album artwork?



I have all this nicely organized artwork for my music, all generally the same size, it looks great when I scroll through it... and then randomly, I have movie artwork that is a) awkwardly short next to everything else, and b) a picture that I can't change in the first place.

3) Built-In Artwork Tools: A lot of the artwork that comes with music I download looks great as-is, but every once in a while, there's a strange edge of white on the picture, or it's an odd shape and would look great if it was cropped just a bit. 80% of the time, I'm too lazy to do anything about it. Just because I don't feel like copying the artwork to my clipboard, opening up Photoshop or Imagewell, and fixing the picture, then pasting it back into iTunes and then erasing the bad artwork.



Almost every other Mac app', for example: Address Book, let's you make small changes to photos, such as cropping, right in the app' itself - quick and easy. But iTunes has nothing like this for their coverflow.

4) Taking Advantage of Lyrics: I have a widget in my dashboard called 'PearLyrics', whenever I play a song in iTunes, in the background it goes out and does a Google search for the lyrics to that song, if it can find them, it puts them in the info of the song file for me. Not to mention, most of the music you buy from the iTunes Store comes with lyrics already. I can look at these lyrics in iTunes, on my iPod... wherever. But, and this seems very strange to me, you can't search this information.



As you can see, I can search: All, Artist, Album, Composer, and Song name... but if I can just barely remember the lines to a song I want to hear, I have no way of searching for it based on the words in the song. Even though I have all the lyrics for the song I'm looking for in it's file info. Seems a waste to me. This info should be searchable in spotlight and especially iTunes.

5) Don't Make Me Pick & Choose: I have hundreds of songs where one song has multiple artist or bands involved. I've always had to pick which artist I wanted to be the "main" artist, and which artist I would just list after the song title.



When I'm out listening to music, sometimes it makes it tricky to find the song I'm looking for by artist if I can't remember which one I choose as the "main" artist - and I just end up doing a search.

So, I think you should be able to assign multiple artist to one song. Something like so:



Now I realize that might make listening the music alphabetically by artist tricky, but I'm sure Apple could figure it out.


I guess that's it off the top of my head. Do you have any ideas?

The other day, on Tim Shey's site, I read that Radiohead was self-releasing their new album... and on top of this, they were implementing a "pay what you want" for people to download their album. Two ideas that record labels should be pooping their pants over :)

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Then today, on Shouting Mat.ch, I read this:

"If two of the biggest acts in the industry can see the digital writing on the wall and totally embrace it—that the old way of doing business is broken—why can't the labels? What Radiohead and NIN are showing is that the business model 'of the future' feared by entrenched interests isn't arriving some time in the horizon. It's touching down now."

This puts a smile on my face - there is a sea change in the music industry... it is saying: we don't need you anymore.

So, Amanda should be posting on here soon - it may be one of her last post though on Caliblog, which makes me kinda' sad... it's going to be lonely on this site with just me. Not to mention: boring.

A lot has happened in the last few months... a lot. But I won't jump into it all at once, I'll get to stuff when I'm comfortable - in the meantime, I need to focus on posting more regularly.