Yahoo song lyrics

Yahoo now provides the ability to search the lyrics of 400,000 songs at http://music.yahoo.com/lyrics

Brilliant drawing!

Relational revolution

In playing around with Twitter and Jaiku, I can’t help but think that there’s a relational revolution going on.  People are craving relationship and finding new ways of connecting with people, even building community with people they’ve never met. 

There are so many ways of doing that: on MySpace connecting with people, on Twitter keeping in touch with what people we know are up to, and likewise on Jaiku and Groovr.  Then there’s blogs like WordPress and LiveJournal and Tumblr where we can put out ideas and stimulate dicussion and connection.  And then there’s so many comunity building tools, from connecting with people about books at LibraryThing, or comparing notes on restaurants at Menuism or comparing travel notes at TravelPod or TripAdvisor.

That’s the technology world, impacting relationships and developing communities around the world.

And then there’s relational impacts in the art world.  There’s a whole area of art called "relational aesthetics" where art (sculpture, drama, music, and anything else artistic) is developing to involve participation by people who would be considered observers in traditional art.

It’s all about connecting with people, a relational revolution.

Dell offering XP on consumer desktops and notebooks again

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that Dell had stopped providing Windows XP for consumer desktops and notebooks,only providing Vista, but have found it necessary to keep on supplying XP as an option.

Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director of JupiterResearch, said many consumers continue to buy XP because it is familiar, it works with their existing hardware and programs, and is overall "good enough," even though Vista boasts a prettier user interface and stronger security.

IMified: a clever way to update numerous sites, including Twitter / Jaiku

I’ve been playing with IMified, a clever tool allowing you to use any of a number of IM tools to update a variety of web sites.

First, you add their contact email address to your IM tool (MSN / Yahoo / AIM / Gtalk / Jabber), and send them a message.  That automatically creates an account.  Then, when you type M, it responds with a menu, from which you can do things like configure your account, or send messages.  You can configure your account to update numerous web sites, including Twitter, Jaiku, Basecamp, del.icio.us, WordPress, Live Journal, Backpack, and so on!  Very clever. 

It’s great having options for interacting with those tools: sometimes email is easiest, sometimes SMS is bext, sometimes via the web is best, and IMified provides one more option.