Geek Force FiveCast 006 (Video)

After a two-week hiatus, I’ve brought the Geek Force FiveCast back to life. I’m going to tweak the format a bit. Instead of “five stories, in five minutes or less, five times a week”, I am going to promise a more reasonable “five minutes of geeky content per week.” That’s something that I think I can stick to, something that would have been even easier to stick to tonight, had iMovie cooperated and imported the first version of this show that I recorded earlier today.

In today’s FiveCast, I bring you up to speed on the format change and then talk about my organization system in iTunes. I don’t think it’s nearly as boring as that sentence makes it out to be.

If you’d like, you can subscribe to the show as a podcast via PodShow.com.

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Geek Force FiveCast 001 (Video)

The first episode of a semi-regular show/podcast from GeekForceFive.com. Today, we cover 1) What GeekForceFive.com is; 2) Accidental AppleTV Purchases; 3) Lost Dueling Analyses; 4) The Beatles on iTunes; and 5) The Incredible Hulk Teaser Teaser.

You can watch the video here, and on a couple of other video sharing sites across the Interweb. And, if you’d like, you can subscribe to the show as a podcast via PodShow.com. I hope to get it listed in the iTunes Store soon, as well.

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iTunes - Number 2 Music Retailer in the United States

The Unofficial Apple Weblog, AppleInsider, and just about every other Apple news outlet out there are now reporting that iTunes has surpassed Best Buy to become the number two music retailer in the United States. Apple had held the number three spot since June, when it overtook Amazon.com. Apple’s online music offering now trails only brick-and-mortar powerhouse Wal-Mart in terms of overall music sales.

Me, I’m a little surprised that this hasn’t happened sooner. I stopped buying CDs on a regular basis about three or four years ago (I still pick up new NIN discs for nostalgia’s sake, but that’s about it, and I immediately rip them to my iMac anyway, then toss the CDs in the closet). The upsides of digital music distribution simply outweigh the downsides. Digital music files take up less space, require fewer physical resources to produce—Al Gore, that champion of inconvenient truths (also an Apple board member) would be proud—and, to my ear, sound just as damn good. Sure, I’d prefer my music to be DRM-free, but I’d rather have music that isn’t going to disappear on me when my daughter decides to color all over my CD collection, or to use the discs as miniature Frisbees.

How about you, Geek Forcers? Do you still buy CDs, or are you soldiers in the digital music revolution?

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