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Last week, I showed you a technique for keeping your music collections separate from one another in a communal iTunes library. This week, I'll try and help out those of you with the opposite problem--people with fractured iTunes libraries across multiple user profiles who want to pool their family's media together.

The root of the problem is that unlike Windows Media Player, Winamp, or nearly any other multimedia jukebox application, there's no way to get iTunes to actively monitor multiple folders on your computer and add new content automatically. In a perfect world, you could tell iTunes … Read more

I was interviewed by BrandWeek the other day for a story on the recent hype around “Design Thinking” in marketing. They were looking for a skeptic and found me. First of all, it is worth noting that the term “design thinking” is of course a clever marketing buzzword. It’s ironic that marketers themselves embrace it as the next big thing as it doesn’t create a new marketing paradigm so much as it proves that marketers are prone to being persuaded by their very own tricks. “Design Thinking” has become a brand, and brands are all the more powerful … Read more

If you subscribe to a broadband Internet service today, more likely you use cable than DSL. According to a study released Thursday by J.D. Power and Associates, cable modem usage is increasing at a faster rate than DSL usage among Internet customers, as dial-up use continues to decrease.

The firm has performed the Internet service provider residential customer satisfaction study for 11 years. Every year, the study measures customer satisfaction with high-speed and dial-up Internet service providers based on five factors: performance and reliability, cost of service, customer service, billing, and offerings and promotions. It uses a 1,000-point … Read more

Since Monday, I have been running a prebeta copy of Windows 7, the next operating system from Microsoft.

At first glance, build 6801 of Windows 7 appears very much like Windows Vista; that's because enhancements to the look and feel part of the operating system typically come late in the development process. Right now, the core programming is being set, and there are already some changes in how Windows 7 will handle computer security.

Gone is the Security Center, introduced in Windows XP SP2. Instead, there will be an "Action Center" that incorporates alerts from 10 existing … Read more

(Credit: Plan Spark)

Now that the exhaustively inspirational Pop!Tech 2008  is over, it’s worthwhile taking a look at what’s next, in other words, at the conference's theme for 2009. The organizers’ choice is pretty telling and may be indicative of a larger shift among not only the elite thinkers gathering at Pop!Tech, but also broader public opinion. Succeeding this year’s theme “Scarcity and Abundance” will be “America Reimagined,” a “top-to-bottom look at America’s opportunities, its challenges, and its future” that promises to explore what it means to be a “superpower in the … Read more

If you're a Netflix customer and you use its Watch Instantly streaming service, well, you're probably used to not having a lot choices as far as which movies you can watch. And if you're a Mac user, you're used to not being able to use the service at all. Netflix is seeking to change this.

On Monday the company announced that it will be using Microsoft's Silverlight software to deliver streaming movies not only to PCs, but to Intel-based Macs as well. The new Netflix player takes advantage of Play Ready DRM, which is built … Read more

YouTube has spent years trying to figure out how to monetize its mostly amateur-quality, user-created content.

The company has turned to pre-roll and post-roll ads, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledges that the "perfect ad product for YouTube has not been invented yet."

Perhaps Google is looking to the wrong inventors.

Traditional "Madison Avenue" advertising has failed YouTube. I agree with the sentiment expressed recently on the Marcom Professional blog:

In my opinion, one of the reasons that videos spread is the homemade quality....People are advertised to thousands of times a day. We see countless … Read more

Along with its nifty new iPhone application, Facebook on Monday night unveiled a new home page. No, not the moderately infamous "redesign" of its member pages--this is a new look for the page that you see when you navigate to Facebook.com without being logged in. It's what you'll see if you're not yet a member.

There's a pretty new blue gradient background, sure, and it makes the whole page look a little bit less stuffy. But more importantly, there's a map of the world with little Facebook "head" icons … Read more

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has caught on to the fact that a sizeable handful of his 100-million-plus users say they aren't too thrilled with the site's new redesign. But he won't change anything, as Facebook occasionally has in the face of user revolt.

A post on the company blog, authored by Zuckerberg, wrote that the site's new focus--which emphasizes the sharing of media and information--is "an important step for us."

"In the last four years, we've built new products that help people share more, such as photos, videos, groups, events, wall posts, … Read more