Chris Blackwell’s Domain

Have you ever watched the television show Clean Sweep on TLC? Well, the host of that television show, Peter Walsh, has take his experience and turned it into the bestselling book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. The book teaches you how to cleanup your house and live a more clutter free lifestyle. I love the clutter free lifestyle and try very hard to keep my house clutter free, but this book opened my eyes to some things even I was doing wrong.

The book itself is broken down into a very easy to follow structure. Part one of the book starts with some case studies telling us how clutter can take control of your life. Then he goes into explaining why you have to remove the clutter from your life, and how you can live a better life clutter free. Part two of the book moves into his six step process for removing all the “stuff” from your house. This six step process is the bulk of the book and is very logically put together. Peter does a great job of breaking down each step and how you need to go about it, even in different scenarios and situations.

Conclusions

This is a very good book for anyone who loves living clutter free, likes to increase their productivity, and generally wants to live a better life. I highly recommend picking this book up, and maybe even a few extra copies for some disorganized friends or family members.

Drupal 6 has been out for a little over a month now and I just finished converting the Xray Sierra website to it. On the surface it looks very similar to Drupal 5 but there are some great new features that I love and important improvements that will build the way to Drupal 7.

Upgrading Drupal

Upgrading from Drupal 5.x is relatively easy and I didn’t have any major problems that I found. You first must uninstall all themes and modules and then put the site in off-line mode. You can not upgrade from Drupal 4.x to Drupal 6. You must first upgrade to version 5 and then to 6. Most modules are not yet compatible with Drupal 6 and that will hold a lot of people back for a while.

OpenID Now Included

The inclusion of the OpenID module is a great victory for the OpenID community. I have been a long supporter of OpenID and I am very glad that Drupal has decided to include it with their list of core modules. OpenID is not activated by default and must be turned on by navigating to Site Building => Modules, then checking the box next to OpenID and saving the new settings.

Should I upgrade now?

I found the upgrade relatively easy. There were a few problems with the existing template I had on my Drupal site, but only because the new theme engine has changed a little. The extensions were a big issue as many of the most popular extensions have not been upgraded to support Drupal 6 as of yet. If you are an early adopter and love have the latest version installed on everything, then by all means go ahead. You will find Drupal 6 to be quite useful and stable, but extension-less.

Web 3.0 and the semantic web have taken some big steps forward as of late. Last week Yahoo! announced that they will be opening up their Open Search platform to allow third parties semantic information to be placed in the search results for a relevant query.

What is the semantic web?

For those who don’t know, the semantic web is the ability to label data according to a set of standard tags for categorization and reference. For example; a contact page usually has some standard information posted on it including phone numbers, email accounts, IM contacts, etc. However, there is no way for a search engine or computer to discern information. Any modern day search engine can read the numbers, the email addresses, the IM addresses but would not be able to asses which number is associated with which person or department.

Using the semantic web, information can be easily tagged including phone and fax numbers and ay other important information readily available to the user. This information is now labelled and accessible to a search engine for usage. If a user searched for ABC Company, the search engine would be able to list ABC Company’s address, phone number, hours of operation and email addresses, all on the search engine results page.

I am really looking forward to the semantic web and what it will bring to a user’s experience of a website or web application. The semantic web will allow users to aggregate data into a clean, and readable format. They will not be bombarded with useless information any longer while trying to find a very specific subject. I predict we will see the semantic web take some big steps forward this year, but I expect it’s break-out will happen in 2009.

Andy Walker from Cyberwalker.com seems to have the inside scoop on the iPhone coming to Canada this September. Andy’s source claims that the iPhone will launch in Canada on September 8 with Rogers Wireless. The post also hints that new data plans will be coming with the iPhone that are more along the lines of the data plan rates that are currently available in the US. This will be great for both iPhone fans and anyone else who currently has a data plan with Rogers.

Over the past two days I have read five different stories, which all originate from a Financial Times posting stating that Apple is in negotiating talks with the record studios to create an all you can eat (all you can listen to) iTunes subscription. The talk has been that this extra feature would be a premium amount that you would pay when buying a new iPod ($100 is the estimated markup).

Did you forget that Apple is #2?

Apple earlier this year passed Amazon to become the second largest music distributer in the world, only behind Wal-Mart. So why would Apple now go ahead and try to break a model that seems to be working so well for them? Now I don’t want to sound like I’m saying Apple Will NEVER do a subscription model, because never is a very long time. What I am saying is that right now things are going great for Apple and the iTunes store and it wouldn’t make sense to move away from that.

I spend hundreds of dollars a year on iTunes, downloading music, TV shows, audiobooks, and soon hopefully movies (bring the iTunes movie store to Canada please). Now lately I have been buying less because I’m in this “only buy DRM-FREE music mode”, but most people don’t care. The average user plugs in their iPod to iTunes and buys whatever songs they want, and they think it’s a bargain at only $1 a song. Over the course of a few years most of these people will spend well over a hundred dollars on music, cause that is only ten albums. I know of dozens of people that would pay $100 tomorrow to download the entire Beatles collection on iTunes (if it were available that is).

iPod Sales Will Keep Increasing

I believe people are a little too caught up in these reports that keep surfacing about iPod sales. Yes, I do believe that iPod sales are dropping, but only because everyone already has an iPod. For a last couple of years Apple was doing very minor upgrades to the iPod lineup and not giving people a really good reason to go buy a new one. That all changed last fall with the introduction of the iPod Touch and the new Nano. With Wi-Fi built in, video into the nano, and let’s not forget the iPhone, people have a really good reason now to upgrade their iPods.

I will keep buying music this week, and the next, because I believe that a iTunes subscription, if any, is a long way off. Do you think we will see an iTunes subscription soon? Do you think iTunes needs a new business model?