added some web bling to sidebar of my blog

Last.FM is a music-oriented social web portal that you can use to keep track of your favorite music. It has the benefit of letting you find other people with similar musical tastes.

Also, it helps educate you about artists, bands, and their songs. The site is highly educational. It will not teach you music theory, how to write music, or how to critically analyze music. It will teach you a lot of history and everything else though.

To kind of do my bit to promote awareness of Last.FM and brighten the pages of my blog I have added several web components to my sidebar. They show what artists and songs I seem to like and a few songs that I have enjoyed recently.

The components use Flash. If you have problems viewing my page you might look into whether that is causing your difficulty or not.

If you like music then I encourage you to check out the Last.FM site yourself.

Apple breaks out new ad for former adversary Paul McCartney album

Apple is showing no hard feelings in the wake of its final settlement with lawyers representing the business interests of Sir Paul McCartney and the other ex-Beatles.

This month McCartney rolled out his new album on the Apple iTunes service, making it accessible in minutes to the tens or hundreds of millions of MS-Windows and Macintosh users.

Last night I saw an iTunes ad written around the new McCartney album and the rocker himself. It was pretty good. Very colorful and creative blend of art, technology, and video. Appropriate, it seems - for the newest blockbuster product on the iTunes service.

A couple of decades ago I was awestruck by the initial Apple TV ad - the ominous yet encouraging "1984" TV commercial.

Nowadays, Apple ads are infinitely more playful and warm. The steaks are no longer life-and-death for Apple, its platform, or its user community.

Now, it is just good, clean fun!

The adoption of entertainment products and services into the Apple core product line families has really transformed the company and a few industries. Just about everyone would say - a lot for the better.

It has given marketeers for Apple a whole new audience to play with too.

iTunes 7.1 released by Apple

Hey, iTunes 7.1 is out!