Quote of the Day

From Blake Ross:

We need an iPod that can monitor your body’s exertion level and flip on Eye of the Tiger when you need it most.

Highly agreed.

Speaking of iTunes/iPod’s. Everyone and their brother has an opinion/pontification on both, and their relative place in the grand scheme of things, blah, blah, blah. Of course this sets the various University folks scrambling about to figure out how to capture some of the iTunes/iPod mindshare and “do something” — especially after my colleagues just down the road “did something”.

The iPod does have great implications for education. e.g.

Could you _just imagine_, a students checks the RSS feed for course blog for his/her course, gets yesterday’s lecture as a .mp3 RSS enclosure (e.g. a “Podcast”) and their aggregator automatically puts on their iPod?

(The “just-a-tad-of-facetious-sarcasm” is that the idea is not bad, but requires a lot of “wouldn’t it be great if…” technology/infrastructure/help documentation to put together. Though I’m sure a year from now, someone on campus will have that very same bright idea, and it will be deemed revolutionary, etc.).

But as exciting as all that might be (and I imagine pitching the above idea would get lots of people excited in some corners of Campus) do you know what excites me the most about iTunes?

Rendezvous (nee, Bonjour). (of course, I say this as I’m listening to Credence Clearwater Revival’s Chronicles off the Lead System Analyst’s shared iTunes).

You see, one of the things that got one of our building Macintosh users excited recently was the ability to share their music to the rest of us via iTunes, a collection of unique Americana music. It’s easy, iTunes->Preferences->Sharing->Share My Music. No server, no middleman, no IT “control” just peer-to-peer creation, sharing, and communication/collaboration.

That’s what is exciting about iTunes.

And that folks, it’s what is really, really, really exciting about folks knowing a little about their own computers, and having application tools that help them collaborate together.

Computing at the ends, that’s what it’s about.