As someone with a private blog and one on a popular network (ZDNet), this is something I face all the time. The greater readership of ZDNet allows me to actually roll up my sleeves and tackle some research-intensive topics that I might not have the time to do without the compensation. - Ed Bott
I always said I was going to try 1password. I guess their idea to give the iPhone client away for free was a smart one. I downloaded the iPhone client and almost immediately downloaded the local client. - Dan
I store all of my passwords in Firefox. I have never found a use for password management software - Mike Fruchter
Not only do I store all my pw's in firefox, but they are usually all the same thing. Unless it's the bank or something. I think life would go on if somebody hacked my Myspace profile :) - ♫ Rahsheen™
I want to use 1Password for everything, but you can't define your own wallet items, which really stinks. Instead, I use Wallet (url: http://waterfallsw.com/wallet/). Cross-platform clients would be nice, but the only ones I've found are really, really, junky. - Mark Trapp
I let Firefox hold them for me (using a Master password) but I store them all in Outlook as contacts. Probably not the best method, but it works. - Shayna
@Aura Mae - yeah the fingerprint readers work well, my computer has one and it's great for logging into windows. The software sucks for web passwords though, but that could be just my system. - Royce Mathew
KeePass, because I can use the same file on my Windows PCs, my MacBook, and my Windows Mobile phone. It also runs on other systems. - MiɳiMagɘ (Sexy Scimitar)
via NoiseRiver
RoboForm and RoboForm2Go. The latter fits on a USB flash drive, encrypts its contents, and works on just about any PC with both IE and Firefox. Worth every penny. - Ed Bott
i used spash id for phone and desktop untill a fatal crash ruined everything. now its all in firefox or in notes on my phone - nick
I may need to try KeePass. Works with PC, Mac, Linux and mobiles. Good find, MiniMage; thx! - Kevin C. Tofel
Another vote for 1Password. Fantastic app. - Wes Justice
Ironically, if my WAG/estimate is even close, x64 Windows is probably outselling the iPhone by about a factor of 10 today, with the margin increasing every month. - Ed Bott
Heck I just want the flash player to work all the time in FireFox. 25% of the time I have to copy the URL into Safari to see the content of certain videos - gfurry
"I think this illustrates the fundamental difference between Apple, a seller of luxury consumer products, and Microsoft, a developer of business and consumer platforms." well said. - Jon Galloway
If they could both get over their silly snubbing of each other and start working together, serious awesomeness could ensue. - Chad Myers
Silly snubbing of each other? Which company has licensed its ActiveSync software to the other? Which one refused to license its Fairplay DRM to anyone? Which company has a vicious ad campaign that bashes the other one's products? I do believe that Apple is the bigger offender here. - Ed Bott
@Ed: I'm not arguing that, and you're right anyhow. Microsoft's not quite as overt, but they aren't making huge efforts on the Mac platform. It's more than token, but not as much as it could be. - Chad Myers
Nice piece. Saying links are unimportant is the weirdest thing I've heard in a while. And thanks for including the links to their bizarre world reasoning or I never would have read them. - chartreuse
Agree with you here. I think Louis looked at it only from a traffic view point, but links are a discovery tool as well. Just because one link doesn't deliver a ton of traffic doesn't mean that it won't help your traffic in the longer term via new subscribers + regular readers...it's just harder to directly measure - Duncan Riley
Links are the veins of the Internet. Blood (read: content) is nothing without veins. ;-) - AJ Batac
links are a discovery tool, period. the moment you start likning for traffic is the moment your site/blog/feed/tweet ceases to matter. - Jim Jannotti
via feedalizr
Links are a meaaure of respect. 9 time out of 10 I link to something because I respect what the author wrote. Why shouldn't I encourage other people to read it? (The other 1 in 10 is when I'm mocking some fool. But they deserve to be read so that others can mock them too, - Ed Bott
What you'll find is that Steven and I agree on this 95% of the way. The headline of what I said did not say they were unimportant. I said it "seems" they are getting "less important". I believe in linking and do it aggressively. What I was referring to mostly, as Duncan mentions, was traffic expectations. It was not looking at search, but it was looking at the rising importance of aggregation and social media tools, when compared to blog links. - Louis Gray
Cont: I don't declare things "dead" or say one thing will "kill" another, as that's superlative. I also included quite a bit of data and transparency to say how I came to my conclusions. But over time, as I watch this closely, there is a shift, and I wanted to highlight it. - Louis Gray
I don't think Louis was suggesting links weren't important overall, just that their influence on traffic is declining. Yup, I see it Duncan's way. Links are also important to SEO as well and we shouldn't underestimate the increasing role of Google Juice. - Shey
Maybe I missed it, but I thought Louis's post was really about the declining "importance" of *blogs* as drivers of conversation in the infosphere -- links are still the medium of relaying information, but the linking is migrating to the social net sites. - Sprague D
Seems everyone is getting pretty bent up about that post Louis did. To quote the comment Louis just left, which sums up the general idea of the post very well I think; the post was about 'looking at the rising importance of aggregation and social media tools'. Now as any blogger who wants to generate traffic does Louis took this to a little bit of an extreme causing a lot of talk around the subject which is great. - John Duff
Cont: The thing is you need links to generate traffic to your blog, these links are coming from social media more and more rather than from bloggers linking to one another is all. - John Duff
His point, handily contained in the post title, was that the importance of blog linking is "declining." Not, in other words, that it's nonexistent. As I wrote in a follow-up post (http://www.outsidethebeltway.c...), that's less true in the political space than in tech. But, certainly, search engines and social media send more traffic. - James Joyner
Promising yes, but less relevant if the machines came with Vista pre-installed. That's the real story: how many folks upgraded XP machines to Vista? - Kevin C. Tofel
promising no, forced yes. I've been testing it for awhile now, some things are very slow (file copy), if XP were better at handling advanced CPUs and more memory i'd swap back. - clarke thomas
Promising possibly but I'm hearing a huge revolt from people who GET Vista and were expecting an O/S they could use. May mean a huge bonus for those smaller shops and possibly Ubuntu - Andrew MacNeill
I work in company where we blocked all machines to upgrade to vista,we even downgraded some machine to Win2000,vista is not well received in most company,let the user discover what they need to get vista running properly and all the app you where used to run on other OS,they all soon downgrade or move to linux,or better and easier: buy a nifty Mac - Ben Borges
via fftogo
Ed, then it's not really "promising for sure" from Rob's perspective, is it? Basically with your statement, his observation has less to do with Vista, and much more to do with new PC sales. ;) - Kevin C. Tofel
Well, I think the (mistaken) conventional wisdom is that people hate it so they either (a) aren't buying new PCs or (b) are downgrading to XP or sticking with XP. My near-universal experience with ordinary users is that they like Vista and consider it an improvement over XP. - Ed Bott
I don't see any big advantage to upgrading to Vista. I installed Vista on my laptop at home about a year ago and do like it (don't love it), though my laptop seems to overheat now from time to time. Considering going back to XP if I have the time to deal with the formatting and installation. - Justin Korn
I guess I'm in the minority here. I bought a laptop 6 months ago and decided to have it shipped with Vista... moving forward and all. Blue screens, memory dumps, hard drive scans, and random reboots are how I was rewarded. Maybe it was just a bad install? I did a fresh install; Same errors. Next install; I am now happily running XP Home. Of course i had to finance my own copy because Dell won't admit that Vista was a horrible option for my laptop. - Becca
My parents bad mouth Vista every chance they get. I'm currently in a windows-free environment, so I can't say. - Brian Norwood
@Kevin C. Tofel - Not many at all, I think. Most are new purchases - about what I expected.I'd never encourage anyone to upgrade from XP. - Rob Bushway
@Kevin and @Ed: A lot of regular folks I'm seeing are choosing to buy new laptops with Vista rather than staying put with what they had with XP. I'm with Ed. This to me shows that regular home users are not "holding out" for the next version - nothing scientific, just something I've been picking up on as I've seen people out and about. IMO - Vista is a marked improvement over XP, especially Tablet stuff. - Rob Bushway
Vista should work better with likely more powerful new laptops, and user experience should be more positive on those devices. There are still things I don't like in Vista, but overall I'd take Vista if my device is capable of running it well. I agree with Rob in that Vista is remarkably better for tablet pc platform. I will take Vista anyday over bloated tabletpc xp edition. - Inksim
I upgraded from XP to Vista and then immediately disabled a bunch of the security junk. Personally I like Vista. Most people seem to dislike it because of the popups you get every time you try to do anything or make any kind of changes. As long as it's disabled it runs just fine. - Richard Miles
I get 90% fewer errors on my new Vista Media Center PC then I did on my old XP Media Center PC. It also handles my very large digital media library much better than it's predecessor. I've been really impressed with Vista's performance and there are lots of things about it that I like even more than my primary computer, my MacBook Pro. - Thomas Hawk
Rob, I completely agree with you, Thomas and Ed about Vista being better than XP. That's why I've used it on all of my PCs for over 2 years. My point still remains: if folks are buying new PCs with Vista, how is that "promising for sure"? Is it promising for Vista, for the PC market, for the economy? - Kevin C. Tofel
For me it is a wash -- nothing in Vista that is compelling but since it came with the laptop and works reasonably well ... - Brian Sullivan
@Becca - It sounds like you had a hardware misconfiguration. The only reason you'll see blue screens and random reboots like that is 1) bad memory or 2) bad hardware...but since everything is running fine in XP, it was probably a bad driver for one of your components while running Vista. - Justin Korn
I'm not upgrading from XP Pro on my Dell. Still helping too many friends with Vista peripheral compatibility problems... it makes me nervous having to spend so much time managing it. - Sally Church
Vista has been great for me. Using XP is a hassle - Shey
@Kevin - I think it is promising for MSFT, Vista and the PC market ( economy in general ). What I had been frequently hearing are that people are digging in their heals and largely ordering computers with XP and staying away from Vista like it was the plague. What I'm seeing visually is that isn't the case. Now, I'm not sure they are buying the new laptop because of Vista, but I don't perceive Vista being the stumbling block to keep them from buying. - Rob Bushway
promising??? I guess you are in the PC tech support/repair business - lol - JackRyanBauer
via twhirl
Rob, I hope you're right... in my travels, I see far more XP these days, which is a shame. Could be that I see notebooks and not desktops... - Kevin C. Tofel
It was a little shaky back in the early days with driver and program support, but I haven't had a problem with Vista in a solid nine or ten months. It's far more stable than XP *ever* was for me. Yeah, I'd have expected more than a modest improvement after five some odd years - but I really don't get all the Vista hate, or conversely the sudden love for XP (surely one of the worst OSes in history, that didn't become remotely usable until SP2). - Eric P
“Been rating songs in Windows Media Player a bit this afternoon. I love doing that but it bums me out that there is no way to get my 5 star WMP songs into my iPhone because Apple and MSFT would rather not make your ratings portable. That sucks.”
Music library right now, 110,077 tracks. 6,328 5 star, 5,447 4 star, 6,950 three star, 2,367 two star, 428 one star, 88,557 unrated. I wish I could just do a search for all my 5 star rated songs on my PC and then transfer those over to my MacBook and import a chunk of them into my iPhone. - Thomas Hawk
Making a 5 star play list won't work? - Andrew Smith
Andrew a 5 star playlist in WMP doesn't do me any good. The files are locked in WMP. MSFT doesn't allow you to search by ratings outside of WMP from within Windows. They'll allow you to sync the music with a Windows phone from within WMP but no luck on the iPhone of course. - Thomas Hawk
you might find this useful. MusicBridge, it syncs metadata between WMP and iTunes Libraries http://is.gd/MX4 - Rahul Das
Apple hates MSFT, MSFT hates Apple and the consumer who wants to use both loses. - Thomas Hawk
I wish song ratings, playcounts, and date added were part of an ID3 tag. I'm also addicted to organizing my music and have written extensively on the topic at my blog: http://softwarereflections.wor... - trextor
Rahul thanks for that. I knew that you could 'extract' the infos from itunes via xml but not this. - Nicole Simon
Can you burn the list to DVD first to separate them from the others then add them to mac? - Andrew Smith
Rahul, my problem is that my library is too big for iTunes. iTunes chokes on large mp3 libraries. I simply need to be able to identify all of my 5 star songs outside of the WMP silo where my ratings are all locked up at present. Then I could import that smaller library into itunes and synch my iphone with it. - Thomas Hawk
I don't think so Andrew, too many songs for a DVD. - Thomas Hawk
Hey Thomas, that's not quite right. After you rate them in WMP, go to Tools and click "Apply Media Information Changes". Do a search for all of your music (make sure you have the Rating column displayed) and click the arrow next to "Rating" and then "Group By". Or just do a search like: is:music rating:5 - Jordan Hofker
If MSFT simply allowed you to do an advanced search in Vista by mp3 rating this could easily be done. But they'd rather lock you into MSFT portable devices than let you have access to *your* ratings outside of a MSFT device. By only allowing you to sort your music within WMP they get to lock out competing devices. - Thomas Hawk
well a long way of doing it could be to make a playlist of all the 5 star songs, and sync the playlist to a portable device. You can then get them all together in one location. If there are too many songs do it little by little. - Rahul Das
not sure how the naming is in english (i have a german windows) - you can make your intelligent playlist with the rating, save it as .3u which should be importable into itunes. - Nicole Simon
Thomas, give "Apply Media Information Changes" a try. I'm interested to know if it works for you. - Jordan Hofker
Jordan how do I do a search for all of my music? - Thomas Hawk
Ok doing an advanced search in my music folder for all files modified before 7-8-2008. Will see what comes up this way. Hmmm it seems that searching with Windows Explorer is limited to 5,000 items. - Thomas Hawk
is:music (Are you using Vista?) (If you hit the 5,000 limit, click "Show All results") - Jordan Hofker
I think MediaMonkey may solve your problem. It should automatically recognize all the ratings you made in WMP, and I think it will sync your iPhone. Not certain on the iPhone though...I know it syncs my Nano perfectly. - Matt
via twhirl
Not portable? In WMP Options, Library tab, make sure you enable option to "Maintain star ratings as global ratings in files." Voila. - Ed Bott
Ed, I've already done that. So tell me now, how do I copy all my 5 star rated songs into a folder that I can then copy over to my Mac? Love seeing you on FriendFeed by the way! :) - Thomas Hawk
For those of you who don't know Ed Bott, he's one of the top Microsoft Windows bloggers out there. Definitely worth following: http://friendfeed.com/edbott - Thomas Hawk
That's why I stick to using iTunes. Makes my life a whole lot easier. - Matt Donders
I ditched WMP years ago. Haven't looked back either. - Granteezy
Thomas, I'm here because of you! To get your 5-star list, click the Music folder (or wherever you have your music stored) and then enter rating:(5 stars) in the Search box. You can even save that search. - Ed Bott
Also, you can use Details View and add the Ratings column in Explorer. Then click the arrow to the right of the column heading and check boxes to filter. - Ed Bott
Ed, when I do that search rating:(5 stars) in the search box I only get 381 results when I've got 6,328 tracks rated 5 star. Any idea why? "Maintain star ratings as global ratings in files," is enabled. - Thomas Hawk
Thomas, click the arrow to the right of the Ratings column and use the Stack By Ratings feature. Now make the File Count column available. That will show you results for all ratings. - Ed Bott
PS: I'm planning a big how-to article on Vista Explorer for publication at ZDNet this Friday which will cover several of these techniques... - Ed Bott
when I click "stack by ratings" it changes the view to show the "5 star" stack, but still only 381 songs if I explore that "stack." I'm running the same search in advanced search mode including hidden and system files and that's been running for about 20 min with 0 results returned yet. - Thomas Hawk
looking forward to Friday's article! - Thomas Hawk
Searching hidden files won't help. Also, you need to start from scratch with your search scope. Your stack is based on the existing search of 5-star ratings. - Ed Bott
I have taken backwards solution to your problem. I refuse to use Apple products and I get along just fine. - Toby Graham
Marcos, WMP works with Windows Media Center, which handles all my music at home -- through three Xbox 360 extenders connected up to plasma displays. I've never been able to get iTunes to load my entire sizeable library, it chokes every time -- especially on gapless playback and loading album art. WMP is a more robust player as far as I'm concerned. - Thomas Hawk
...but I like my iPhone much better than my former Windows Smartphone and need to figure out how to get my 5 star songs isolated outside of WMP in order to import just those songs into iTunes where it shouldn't choke -- which is what I'm working on. Just wish it wasn't so difficult. - Thomas Hawk
Great discussion on this btw. I am in the same boat, I use WMP to listen to the large music collection and have it save my star ratings with the update process described here. One way I can think of to get your files (without maintaining folder structure) is to search for *.mp3 in your music folder, then sort by rating. You may need to turn on that column. Then just highlight (shift click a span) the 5-star files and then drag or copy-and-paste to your destination. - Jeremy Hall
I do a manual update of media files to my iPod anyway, so I don't have any files in my iTunes library; it is just a media uploader to my iPod. If you are set up this way, then just have the iPod screen open on the iTunes and drop all of your files directly onto the screen and it will copy to the device without having to add to iTunes. - Jeremy Hall
Jeremy, don't sort, filter! Click the arrow to the right of any heading and you'll see an arrow that lets you check boxes to filter by that heading, in this case by the six entries in the Ratings column (1-5 stars plus Unrated). - Ed Bott
Yep, your list of "Mobile Phone/Email, TiVo, GPS, PC, iPod" +++ RSS, FriendFeed!, Google mobile apps, online banking, BlackBerry 3G unlimited data & internet access! w00t! with GPS geo-location built right in to the phone; plus Mobile Video, Mobile Camera (ok it's only 2.0 Mpx), my "good" digital camcorder; WiFi, NAS data server, ultra fast Cisco routers on broadband internet. Also, my husbands medical equipment: hi-tech Blood Pressure monitor and Full Lipid/Cholesterol Blood analyzer. - Susan Beebe
Agreed. You alluded to something else in terms of SMS, but I think it's worth a specific mention when comparing Apples to Apples, as it were. http://www.jkontherun.com/2008... - Kevin C. Tofel
Thanks, Kevin, I updated the post with that link. - Ed Bott
