Ed Batista

Airport Express on Windows XP

I received an Airport Express as an early Christmas present from my Mom today.  (Thanks, Mom!)  According to Apple, even benighted Windows users such as myself can use this handy device to play iTunes through a home stereo, as a wireless access point, or as a print server.  All I wanted was to wirelessly connect my iTunes library to my home stereo, and that's certainly possible--I'm listening to Clifford Brown and Max Roach as I write this--but easy?  Well, not so much.  Assuming you can get the Airport Express connected to your stereo on your own, here's what you have to do to be able to play iTunes via your wireless network:

First, I'll admit that I made things harder on myself by my refusal to "upgrade" to XP Service Pack 2.  I tend to think that "SP" stands for "Satan's Playground," and I'm sticking with SP 1, thanks very much.  However, that means that I had to jump through some additional hoops to get the Airport Express to work.  If SP 2 works for you, I suspect you'll have an easier time of it.

Second, to allow my Win XP SP 1 machine to even see the Airport Express, I had to open Port 5353.  If I'm mucking about with "ports" I'm in far over my head, but it was too late to quit.  Thank the Lord for some UK outfit called iFelix--just follow their instructions.  (Note that iFelix has an extensive Airport configuration FAQ.  Good stuff, better than Apple's.)

Third, now that you can see the Airport Express, use the surprisingly crappy Airport Admin Utility (which comes on the install CD) to enable AirTunes on the device.  (Given that this function is a centerpiece of their Airport Express marketing materials, one might think that Apple would enable this function from the get-go...but one would be wrong.)  After opening the Utility, select your device, click "Configure," go to the "Music" tab, and check "Enable AirTunes on this base station" AND "Enable AirTunes over Ethernet".  Click Update and OK out.

Fourth, open iTunes and go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced, and select "Look for remote speakers connected with AirTunes".  Close and re-open iTunes, and you should see a new menu box in the lower right corner of the screen that will allow you to toggle between your computer's speakers and your Airport Express.

So far, so good.  I can use the iTunes interface, I can fit more music on the laptop, and no more trudging across the room--one small step for man, one giant leap for couch potatoes.

UPDATE: In the comments Mark McDonald links to what looks to be very handy step-by-step documentation for setting up an Airport Express on Windows XP.  Thanks, Mark!

 

tags: airport express itunes ifelix

 

Last.fm: Attention Data in Action

Last.fm is one of my favorite "attention data" use cases.  After installing their plugin, your iTunes playlist metadata is shared with Last, which creates a set of charts that depict your listening habits, a list of recommended listens and reads, and a musical "neighborhood" filled with people who share your tastes.

One of the uses for attention data that I often discuss when describing AttentionTrust is getting connected with people who share your tastes via a system that can parse your mutually shared data, and that's precisely what your Last.fm neighborhood does.

Here are the 20 musical artists I've listened to most frequently as of Dec. 20th.  (It's actually the top 21, just so I could include a reference to Haywood.)

And here are the top 20 overall artists for my closest Last.fm neighbor:

We share four artists in our top 20 (Jets to Brazil, Mission of Burma, Pavement and Paul Westerberg), and I know you'd find a lot more if you explored our charts further.  So who's the guy with such good taste?  My brother.

I mentioned Last to him over the summer, and he installed the plugin.  I forgot he was using it until a few weeks ago, when I was checking out my Last neighborhood and saw him hanging out among my musical compadres.  I didn't need Last to tell me that my brother and I like the same music, but I was surprised that our tastes were so similar.  Attention data: bringing families together since 2005.

tags: attention attentiontrust last.fm

The LeeVees

Thanks to All Songs Considered's 2005 Holiday Show, I'm obsessed with the LeeVees' "Applesauce Vs. Sour Cream":

Applesauce versus sour cream
Applesauce or sour cream
It’s the choice you’re gonna have to make
Which to put on your potato cakes

Applesauce versus sour cream
Applesauce or sour cream, now
It’s the choice you’re gonna have to make
Tell your mom to fry not bake, now

Life has many decisions
It moves in all directions
This is just one huge, enormous, big decision
You have to make
You have to make it

(Alright, listen up)
One has fruit
And one has milk
If you’re lactose-intolerant, then take a pill, now
It’s the choice you’re gonna have to make
The grease is startin’ to coagulate

Your lawyer called, said everything’s fine
Potato contracts have been signed, yeah
I think your heart just skipped a beat
You can’t wait for your greasy treat, now

Life has many decisions
It moves in all directions
This is just one huge, enormous, big decision
(You have to make)
You have to make it
(You must decide)

Da da da dum
Da da da dum
Da da da dum dum da da dum

Da da da dum
Da da da dum
Da da da dum

You have to make
You have to make it
Jews have to make

Listen up at All Songs Considered (RealPlayer required--ugh) or just buy it at iTunes.  Best pop-punk Hanukkah song I've heard in many a year.

tags: leevees hanukkah chanukkah latkes

The Gap: Destroying the Brand in Order to Save It

Slate's Seth Stevenson is dismayed that The Gap went to the trouble and expense of hiring Spike Jonze to shoot a way kewl spot touting their remodeled stores only to bury it in a short run in a handful of markets.  (Slate's showing the spot that actually aired in low- and high-bandwidth options [Windows Media], but Stevenson also links to a far superior, alternate version [Quicktime] apparently salvaged from the cutting-room floor by Jeffrey Wells.)

The spot depicts the destruction of an ordinary Gap outlet at the hands of shoppers, staff and random passers-by, culminating in a dog wandering through the dusty, clothing-strewn, depopulated scene.  It's both thrilling and shocking, particularly the alternate version with the Edvard Grieg soundtrack.  In light of The Gap's recent poor performance, Stevenson thinks they're twiddling their thumbs:

This is rearranging the track lighting on the Titanic. It's the entire Gap brand that needs a scrubbing, not just the stores. The Ad Age story quotes an analyst who says, "The Gap is now a category placeholder. It's the name everyone knows, but aren't real sure what it stands for anymore."

So: You've got a brand that everyone's familiar with, which is half the battle. The next step, it seems, would be to reinvent the meaning of that brand. It sounds like what the company needs is a piece of marketing that suggests radical changes are afoot—that the Gap brand is about to tear itself down to its foundations and be reborn. Where could they possibly find something like that?

Instead of running the "Dust" spot in just a couple of markets, and tying it exclusively to the remodeling effort, Gap should have used this ad as the centerpiece of a national campaign.

That would be a breathtakingly big swing for the fences, and I'd guess that a sleeper cell in The Gap's marketing department agrees with Stevenson--the Jonze spot is too ambitious to really be about store remodeling--but cooler heads prevailed and nipped the idea in the bud.

At 38, I'm old enough to remember The Gap's two-stage transformation, first from off-brand denim outlet to cooler-than-Levi's, and then on to world domination via sort-of-preppy, sort-of-hip GeneriClothes.  But a fundamental problem they face now is that the market's fragmented out from under them, and fewer people want to wear GeneriClothes these days--we're all pursuing our individual style muses.  (Except me--I'm hip enough to know that The Gap isn't, but not hip enough to care--demonstrated by my use of 1920s slang like "hip"--and I still love those worker jeans.)

The Gap has become the transparent background music of fashion--the aesthetic you never see because it's everywhere (and thus effortless to imitate, undercut or adapt.)  I like expansive, dramatic gestures--even when they fail, you have a lot more fun making the attempt--and I'd love to see The Gap destroy its increasingly-meaningless brand in order to save it--but I'm hard-pressed trying to think of a big retailer that's pulled off a similar trick.  The New Coke conspiracy theories are the closest I can get, and that's thin ice for a corporate strategy (but I'd love to see the PowerPoint.)

tags: the gap seth stevenson spike jonze

Fauxtilitarian Design

Hummer is taking out full-page ads for the Alpha, which features the "Duramax 6600 Turbo Diesel" engine and the "Allison 1000" transmission, making it "the new benchmark in off-road exotic vehicles."  It's a new benchmark, alright--the very latest in phony utility.  It's fauxtilitarian!

I love solidly-built, well-designed objects that are intended to be used hard and last a lifetime.  And I'm as susceptible as the next consumer to the lure of an aspirational purchase.  But when Hummer's touting the "Duramax 6600" on the back of the Wine Spectator (see the Dec. 15 issue), well, fauxtility has officially exhausted itself as an aesthetic.  I'm expecting a return to flashy superficiality any day now.

tag: fauxtilitarian

Welcome, Randal Pinkett Fans (and Non-Fans)

Apparently TV's not dead yet.  Thousands--well, hundreds--OK, dozens--of people have stopped by this site in the past few weeks to read a brief interview I conducted with Randal Pinkett, the latest Apprentice, back in July.  (It's the Live Web in action, really--Google "randal pinkett" and that post is #11.  Crazy.)  At any rate, welcome, and if you're interested in design, technology, advocacy and/or nonprofits--the topics I usually cover, and the focus of my interview with Randal-- feel free to subscribe.

Oh yeah--the controversy surrounding the finale?  Randal should've said:

Mr. Trump, like you, I believe it's essential to hire the very best people possible.  And I believe Rebecca has proven that she would be an outstanding contributor to the Trump organization.  Mr. Trump, I'm honored that you hired me as your Apprentice, and I'd like to take this moment to make my first decision in your employ.  (Turns to Rebecca)  Rebecca, I'm incredibly impressed with your drive, intelligence and capability, and I'd like to hire you as MY Apprentice.

I wish Randal had made a different choice, but hey, I wouldn't have come up with that on the spot either.  And Trumpy shouldn't have put him in that position to start with.

Doc Searls Closes Syndicate

Doc Searls' closing keynote at Syndicate was an inspiring talk.  It was a natural extension of the ideas he first laid out in "Saving the Net," the Nov. 16 article in Linux Journal that Doc called the longest and most important piece he's ever posted online.  I've interspersed my headers with direct quotes and slide text from Doc's presentation to try to render the hour-long talk as a reasonably concise blog post--it's still long, so follow the jump:

Jonathan Schwartz Keynote at Syndicate

Doc Searls interviewed Sun President & COO Jonathan Schwartz as the Day 2 keynote here at Syndicate.  Most of their discussion focused on hardware, business models, DRM and other topics better covered elsewhere.  But what little Schwartz had to say about blogging was compelling.  He's adamant about the need to eliminate almost all the distinctions between internal communications among employees and external communications with customers, partners and other stakeholders, and he clearly sees blogs as the best way to make that happen:

There's very little communication internally that you want to keep private.

Intranets are such an anachronism...they’re going to die.

The dividing line between what's internal and what's external is diffusing, and the utility is dying away.

The defensive approach is "Don't give employees [blogs]—they’ll leak information."  The offensive approach is, "Give them [blogs]...they can communicate and create more opportunities."

Schwartz also talked about how Sun used blogs to proactively address criticism of the company from competitors and others:

Blogging has played an enormously important part in the revitalization of Sun’s reputation...

Rather than spend $150 million on an ad campaign, let’s just start speaking in our own voices [on our blogs]. And guess what? Authenticity wins out.

If you are authentic, if you communicate consistently, you can basically counter anything anyone says about you.

This resonated with an earlier comment he made:

Doc Searls: So transparency is the fulcrum on the lever now?

Jonathan Schwartz: Authenticity is the fulcrum.

tags: syndicate syndicate conference doc searls

Jonathan Schwartz on Authenticity

Doc Searls is interviewing Sun's Jonathan Schwartz as the opening keynote on Day 2 at Syndicate.  I'm sure I'll have more to say on this later, but I wanted to post this exchange immediately:

Doc Searls: So transparency is the fulcrum on the lever now?

Jonathan Schwartz: Authenticity is the fulcrum.

Scott Anderson's Keynote at Syndicate

Scott Anderson, Director of Enterprise Brand Communications for HP, gave the opening keynote this morning at Syndicate, "the premier event for content syndication trends," and he had some interesting things to say on behalf of a massive corporation that's embraced blogging wholeheartedly.  From one of Scott's first slides:

• A corporation cannot dialog
• A corporation is a collection of people
• People dialog with people

Scott commented further:

HP isn’t blogging with anybody; people within HP are blogging...

Doc Searls is the conference chair and introduced Scott, so the parallels with the first three theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto are surely no accident:

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

Old news: Doc and his fellow Cluetrain co-conspirators have won.  Their fundamental message is now the conventional wisdom among big-brand corporate marketers.  More from Scott proving this point (I'm paraphrasing here):

• No flacks.  All HP blogs are written by the person whose name is at the top of the page, not ghostwritten by PR staffers.
• No lawyers.  HP's legal team initially wanted to vet all posts.  Scott recognized that this would have killed their blog experiment in its infancy and fought hard to resist it.  As an apparent compromise, HP has established blogging guidelines (see below) that allow bloggers to be themselves (within limits) while keeping their attorneys at bay.
• No censorship.  HP learned a tough lesson early on when an overzealous staffer deleted a negative comment from the blog of David Gee, a senior marketing exec.  The incident threatened to give HP a black eye in the blogosphere, but they restored the comment, Gee rapidly posted a response, "Honesty is the best policy," and they now realize that negative comments are the most important ones.

Despite HP's commitment to openness, their employee's company blogs aren't personal platforms.  The company has established some clear, common sense guidelines, excerpted below, to help bloggers find the right balance:

1. Speak for yourself. ("Write your own blog in your own distinct voice.")
2. Target timely topics.  ("...relevant to the business technology and business issues and concerns of our customers.")
3. Keep the communication lines open. ("...unfiltered two-way communication.")
4. Always show respect. ("Respect the blog medium.")
5. Preserve privacy and confidentiality. ("Reflect common sense and good business judgment.")

After a year of active blogging, HP views it as a success.  According to Scott, readership and press coverage are up, a number of productive discussions have been sparked by blog posts, and customers are responding favorably.

Rich Marcello, General Manager of HP's Business Critical Systems, has said:

A customer stated "how much he liked my blog and that it was just as important to him that he knew who he was buying from and what that person believed as it was to understand the products.”

Rich also recently posted a one-year assessment of his HP blog:

Well, I've been writing this blog now for about a year. The other day I was thinking about what I was trying to accomplish when I started last December and whether or not I actually did what I set out to do. I think I have. In a nutshell, I wanted to show you a little bit more about who I am as a person and what I really believe on many different topics. No hype, just a really direct and honest conversation on a host of topics. Hopefully, you've felt some of that in the writing and sometimes, at least, found some of the topics helpful. For me personally, it's been really useful to write down as honestly and crisply as possible what I believe.

Then I came across a really good discussion of two different kinds of leaders written by Sobonfue Somé. I thought the description of the first kind of leader is how I've tried to act in this blog (and actually in my entire life) and so I thought I would share it with you here:

"You could say there are two different kinds of leaders: the leader who strives to be herself and retain her genuine identity while helping those who follow her, bringing along her goodness and failures and exhibiting both; and the leader who figures out and imitates the model that people want to see, showing her good qualities and hiding her flaws, 'having it all together' and so forth. The first kind many people find frightening, partly, I think, because it suggests no one can reach perfection. The second kind of leader is more appealing to our view of the world. But the second path is a deception from the beginning. As a human being, it's hard to be flawless, isn't it?”

tags: syndicate syndicate conference doc searls