The do it all online music service Spotify launched in the US today. Since I first checked out Spotify courtesy of a friend from London a few months back, I’ve been keeping tabs on when it would finally make it to North America. There’s no shortage of choices if you’re looking to listen to music online. Why is Spotify so exciting? In the simplest terms , Spotify just does everything right.

Doing everything right starts with setting the service up. You’re asked to sign in, which you can do via your Twitter or Facebook account, or you can create a new username and account right on the spot. Next you’re prompted to download the Spotify app. I grabbed the OSX version. There is also a Windows version, and several different mobile versions available. The time it took me to go from creating my account to listening to my first song was just about two minutes. It was a speedy, hassle free process with no unnecessary bloat. That is signup done right.

When you fire up the Spotify app for the first time you’re thrown into a slick, grayscale interface with a massive number of choices to start playing music. You can check out ‘Top Lists’, a selection of massively long playlists that are all over the place musically. Some of it is the standard stuff you’ll here on any radio station, but I was happy to see some more obscure tracks from Thievery Corporation and Lupe Fiasco popping up right off the bat. The ‘What’s New’ tab has selection of just released albums, as well as a blog type newsfeed that has Spotify news and playlists created by various users. The ‘Feed’ section expands on this feature, and this looks like a useful way to see new features as well as discover new music that is highlighted here.

The best feature of Spotify is the search. It’s just a simple search box, similar to what appears in a million other apps,but the results are just off the chain. It’s the amount of quality music that you can find here that really separates Spotify from the other music apps out there. For instance I did a search for Jeru the Damaja, an amazing but slept on MC who made his mark in the 90’s NYC hip hop scene. I found most of his albums ready to be listened to. Similarly, I ran a query for Jawbreaker, one of the all time greatest punk bands you’ve never heard of, and got a whole mess of their tunes to listen too. Jeru and Jawbreaker aren’t completely unknown, but are far from popular. The fact that I can dig this stuff up and listen to it hassle free is the promise of the web delivered in full. There is a full equipped Library feature that allows you to combine songs you find on Spotify,along with your own tunes into one very easy to organize mass of songs. There’s no hopping around, copying songs from one spot to another. You can hear it all in one place. That’s slick.

Another feature that separates Spotify from the pack of other streaming music apps is the fact that it plays nice with your music. At some point during the installation, the music stored locally on my drive was cataloged, and is available for play under the ‘Library’ and ‘Local Files’ tabs. If I’m in the mood to listen to something I already own, I don’t have to switch apps. I just pop into the Library tab and play it. This is extremely convenient. This compatibility extends over to any music devices you might have, like your iPod and Android phone.  It eliminates the need to use iTunes for the most part, which is great, because I have a pretty cold relationship with that app due to the horrific UX, nausea inducing DRM and constant massive updates.

An app isn’t an app these days without social features, right? Thankfully, music is one area where being social and connecting with your friends is a big positive. Spotify integrates with Facebook, and once you connect the two, you’re able to see your friends that are also Spotify users, through this connection you can send songs to friends, which will pop up in their inbox. Does a track remind you a certain friend? Passing it along to them is as simple as clicking on their profile and selecting the music you want to share. In many cases, the social features of music apps feel like a tacked on throwaway, but the Facebook integration and inbox feature are well integrated here and actually useful. I can see myself sharing tunes here, where I tend to ignore the social aspects of the other music sites I’ve tried.

Spotify is ad supported, and there are banner ads in the main interface and occasionally an audio ad in your music stream. I barely noticed their existence, and they don’t diminish the experience at all. There’s also a premium, paid version of the app available. The paid version lets you listen to music on the move via your mobile phone or offline if you’re without an internet connection. I haven’t tried the premium version yet, so I can’t say how it works, but I’m planning to give it a shot at some point in the future when I have a need for those specific features.

Spotify is the music app that we’ve all been waiting for. It does one thing perfectly: it lets you listen to the music you want to hear with no hassles. It’s a simple concept but Spotify executes it with perfection. Well done Spotify, you’ve got a true believer in this music nerd.

These are the basic apps that I use every single day, and have become absolutely indispensable. If there were a way to effectively quantify the time these apps have saved me, I would conservatively estimate it would total in the weeks. Think of this as Optimization 101. It’s my hope that you can read this post, download these apps, set them up and integrate them into your workflow in no time. Setting up apps to save you time, should be easy and…save you time. Let us know how these apps work out for you in the comments, and if you have other apps that improve your workflow we definitely want to hear about them.

Skitch

If you do any work on the web at all, there are probably a few points in your day where you need to do something with a photo. Snag a photo for a blogpost, resize it, change the format, share it, email it, annotate it or grab a screenshot to make a point. This was a clunky process for me, requiring a series of cobbled together programs, a couple of save states and way too much time. Then I discovered Skitch. Skitch is really the Swiss Army Knife for imaging. If you aren’t a designer who regularly fires up Adobe, then Skitch is what you need. It covers all the imaging basics in one interface. Screenshots, adding notes and arrows, saving in just about every format, sharing and resizing are all done in one window.  There is no learning curve. For the last 3 years, Skitch has become my go to tool for anything involving photos. Skitch also has one the best user interfaces I’ve ever used; it’s lovely.

1Password

In the real world, there are two schools of password thought. You use the same password for everything, because it’s convenient. We all know this is an incredibly insecure bad practice, just waiting for a nightmare hack to bite you in the ass. The other school is using a different password for everything, but with the amount of accounts we all have it becomes an organizational nightmare remembering which password belongs to which account. I woke up one day and realized I had about 50 different accounts, and spent more time resetting forgotten passwords then I did actually working in those apps. Cue 1Password.

1Password is the perfect password manager. You only need to remember the master password, and the app takes care of the rest. It creates complicated, secure passwords for all your logins, and organizes them in a nice interface. Once unlocked, it will auto fill your username and password for all your sites right in the browser with a single click. It keeps track when you change login information automatically. It works with Dropbox, so you can backup your master password list and retrieve it on the fly. 1Password handles multiple “Identities”, making it simple to organize work, personal and other password lists by how you use them. There’s a great, secure wallet feature for managing different credit cards and purchasing information. It is constantly being updated by the good folks at Agile Web Solutions, so there is never a compatibility issue. Best of all, it’s dead simple and it just works, every time, day after day.

Evernote

Prior to using Evernote, I would constantly bookmark articles, websites and little bits of the web to return to later. In every browser, my bookmark list would become cluttered and unusable after a week. My bookmarks looked like someone taped an M-80 to a dictionary and then taped it back together. Using Evernote has let me build a customized system for keeping track of everything I find interesting, or worth hanging onto on the web. It is handy for work, personal interests and organizing trains of thought and projects among groups of people where link sharing is a requirement.

The simple organizational style is what separates Evernote from every other similar app or bookmarking method out there. Find something interesting? Just click the Evernote button, select the appropriate tags, add a personal note if you like, and you’re done. The app takes care of the syncing and storage. When you’re looking to retrieve something, you can search your notes by tag, date or content. It’s also possible to just browse through your notes, which can be a great way to create “Aha!” moments. I frequently stumble onto items I’ve saved in the past, but have forgotten about. It’s a bit like an online diary composed of your train of web browsing thought.

Possibly the most brilliant feature of Evernote is its’ ability to work with the camera on your mobile phone or computer. You can take a snapshot of a flier, book, record or some other visual cue and make a note out of that. This is amazing for remembering items that catch your eye on the go that you might otherwise forget. This feature has become indispensable. When someone has a book that looks interesting, I snap the cover and make a note. Through this method I have built a massive “To Read” list. I’ve run into other people who use the photo feature on Evernote to track business receipts and keep track of menus at restaurants they love.

After using Evernote for a while, you’ll discover that you have compiled your own custom reference library, which is a valuable tool for anyone that does creative work. Evernote works across just about every browser, platform and mobile device so you’ll always have access to your notes. It’s a truly simple, bulletproof organizational tool even for people like me who are disorganized by nature.

Clips

Clips takes one of the most basic, but useful features of any computer, the clipboard, and hugely expands what it is able to do. Clips can help you make short work of repetitive tasks. Instead of just saving the last item you copy or cut, Clips just keeps on saving them and presents them in a list. This lets you visually choose from a list of clipboard items. If you’re making a list, sending multiple responses or editing a document, this is an enormous time saver. It’s also possible to build a pre-loading clipboard with some phrases or items you find yourself having to type frequently. Clips includes clipboard sharing, and the hot-keys, formatting and arrangements of how the app appears are all totally customizable to fit right into your workflow. I used to find myself typing the same things again and again, but now I just keep a clipboard of my most frequently typed phrases and insert them with a single click. I actually feel like I haven’t event tapped the full potential of Clips. If you were so inclined, it would be possible to really go crazy, and build massive lists of sentences, links, signatures and other items that pop up all the time. Any way that you use it, Clips will become an essential time saver from the second you load it onto your computer.

These apps are a good start for anyone looking to streamline their workflow, and save time doing what is essentially busywork. We all have a lack of time, so if there is a faster way to get things done, why not take advantage of it? Good luck, and be sure to fill us in on how your quest for optimization works out.

We love a good infographic. Truthfully though, who doesn’t? Over the last two years, I’ve begun to notice that infographics are one of the most popular items that you see blogged, tweeted, re-tweeted and passed around online. Infographics look pretty. They take what are often complicated data-sets or bits of information, and make them simple to understand. You can digest an infographic quickly. The people who create infographics are able to make a point fast, and the evidence, in the form of data is included right in the argument itself. They are compact, to the point, attractive, data rich and clever. Looking over the analytics for a wide variety of our clients, the numbers show that infographics grab the clicks on blogs, Twitter and Facebook across all kinds of audiences. Infographics are the perfect format for sharing information in the social media world.

A few days ago, we were discussing creating an infographic here at The Blog Studio. It isn’t easy, was the conclusion we came to pretty fast. You need data. You need to make a point with that data. You need design skills. You need to create a way to display that data so it makes your point. Then you need to make it look pretty. It’s a tall order, and there are a lot of very disparate skills involved. The person who crunches the numbers may not have the design chops to make the end product. The designer may need a hand figuring out how to make the graphics tell their story.

We did some poking around, and discovered the Google Public Data Explorer. Leave it to Google Labs to take a complicated process, and simplify it enough so that anyone has a shot of creating an informative, attractive infographic. That’s what Public Data Explorer is all about.

To get started creating your infographic masterpiece, begin by exploring the data sets that Google provides as part of the web app. Stat geeks are going to lose it when they see what’s available here. There is deep financial data: GDP, personal income, unemployment and retail sales are all available. Population data is covered by country, both currently and historically. A vast amount of health data, like info on prevalent STD’s, flu outbreaks and cancer cases is presented by location. The environment, education, greenhouse gasses and whole lot more data is available for your number crunching pleasure. Since Data Explorer is relatively new, I imagine more datasets will become available as time goes on. It’s also possible to add your own datasets in a variety of formats to work with.

Once you’ve decided on the data you’d like to work with, you’re presented with many ways to parse and compare this data. It’s possible to break things down by location, time frame, density, performance and many more useful ways. Decide what data comparisons make your point, and then quickly see them graphed and displayed. You have the option to display the data in several graphic formats, including overlaying it on Google Maps. The colors, size and many of the graphic elements are completely configurable to make a wholly unique infographic. There are tons of filters and customization options available, depending on the data you’re working with. I can safely say you won’t feel limited in any way as you are creating your infographic masterpiece.

The final results are outstanding. While the infographics lack the last bit of sparkle you’ll find in an infographic done up from scratch by a talented designer, they still look great.  You would be happy to pass along something you created with the Public Data Explorer to your Twitter friends, or use it in a professional presentation. A tiny bit of additional polish from an Illustrator wizard could easily make one of these infographics as visually appealing as any I’ve come across.

To the best of my knowledge, Google Public Data Explorer is a first. It’s the only serviceable, self-contained, infographic creation tool I’ve come across. I’ve tried some other apps that claim to do the same thing, but the results have been very sub-par. Not here. I already have plans to create some infographics with this tool for blog posts and presentations I’m working on now. It’s that good.

If you’re a stats nerd, a designer, a speaker or someone with clever ideas that could use the graphics treatment, you will find the Google Public Data Explorer supremely useful. It took me two hours of playing with the app to become a full fledged convert. If you’ve been wanting to make some infographics, but needed help in some area of creation this is the app for you. This FAQ from Google will get you up and running fast.

You can definitely expect to see lots of infographics by The Blog Studio popping up soon.

The Conference. Shriek. Gasp. Cower. Shudder.

Is there any industry more conference happy then the tech world? From a three person tweetup at a local bar straight on up to CES and SxSw, if you were so inclined you could attend a conference everyday of the year. Should you?

The question I see asked more than any others: “Is it worth it?”

Let’s try to answer that.

Pricing The cost of a conference is really the biggest factor in deciding if it’s worth attending. There is a certain slice of the conference world that we can eliminate right off the bat: the wildly overpriced. They tend to be targeted at the corporate market, and the thinking behind the pricing is “Hey, your company is footing the bill, so who cares!” Usually, there are one or two “Big Names” attached as speakers, which is supposed to somehow justify the outrageous price tag. These conferences are never worth the money. There is no “magic bullet”, secret strategy or tip you can learn in a few hours that will ever justify the cost.

If an event you want to attend is double, or even more than what most conferences cost it’s a rip off, plain and simple. Save your money. If the pricing seems on par with similar events, it passes the pricing test and is worth examining further.

Stay on the lookout for tiered pricing. Some conferences have a low general ticket price, then offer upgraded passes. This can be a fine pricing structure, but take a look at what the basic ticket gets you. If you can get into most of the events, then it isn’t an issue. I’ve noticed in the last year, that more and more events are requiring an upgraded badge to get into the most interesting part of the conference. This stinks. Check that the type of entry you buy actually gets you into the events you want to attend. The entry fee may seem very reasonable, until you realize all you’re entitled to is the right to hang around an empty conference room showing YouTube videos on repeat.

Scheduling The way speeches, panels and roundtables are scheduled can easily make a conference with great content a nightmare to attend. It makes sense to write yourself a quick plan of what you want to attend before you buy your ticket. Carefully take a look at the conference schedule, and see how many sessions are happening each day. Is there a huge amount of downtime, breaks or dead air? No question that some free time is important to digest what you’re learning, especially during multi-day events. You also don’t want to drop your cash so you can spend half the day in a shabby hotel lobby drinking bad coffee while annoying MLM’ers glad hand you and stuff your pockets full of business cards you won’t ever use.  At a good conference, there will always be something going on. At a really good conference, they will even have social events or other activities in between the main events to keep you learning, socializing and enjoying yourself.

It’s important to determine how man sessions you’ll be able to attend.  A well put together event will be structured so that all the attendees can make it to a session during every period. Sometimes the sessions are overlapping, which is a sign of a poorly administered event.

Make sure you take note of where the sessions are too. In some cases, the talks may be spread out in different buildings, or even entire different parts of the city. Depending on what session you attend first, you may not be able to make it from session 1 over to session 2 on time. It would seem like a no-brainer to schedule events in close physical proximity, but I’ve attended conferences where it took a full 30 minutes to get from point A to Point B. If you aren’t able to make it to all the sessions you want, re-consider attending.

Content Reading the marketing materials for a conference would lead you to believe that not attending that conference will passively destroy your career. Finding out who is speaking, what they are speaking about and the format they will be delivering the information is, are really the heart of any event. Doing just a few minutes of research on your own, beyond the official website of the event, will quickly give you a sense of the quality of the content.

Who will be speaking at the event? There is an entirely new breed of person that has invaded the tech world in the last few years: The Professional Talker. You probably know their names, see them hawking their wares on Twitter and being constantly quoted in blog posts. The Pro’s are often the keynote, or main event at a conference. No matter how big their reputation (or head is), don’t let the professional speakers be the reason you attend a conference. Lot of pro’s have interesting, useful things to say. You can nearly always find these things on YouTube. The talk you’re going to hear is probably just a slightly customized version of the same speech they’ve given dozens of times. If you’re attending a conference mainly to hear Famous Social Media Guru X enlighten you, my advice would be to save your money. You can definitely dig up the wisdom they dispense somewhere online.

Most likely the speaking roster will be filled with people who aren’t Internet Famous, and you don’t follow on Twitter. This is where it pays to do a bit of digging. Do a quick search for their name, and the company they work for. See if they have a blog, take a quick dig through their Twitter stream and look to see if they have spoken at other events. You can usually make a pretty accurate determination about what these people can teach you by seeing what their online footprint looks like. If they have interesting content posted online, it’s a good bet that will have interesting insights to share in person. If they work for a company that are innovators in the field they are speaking about, or do research at a university on this topic, you can expect to learn something. If the speakers have no online presence and work for a company you’ve never heard of, you might want to skip this one. If someone has original, intriguing and worthwhile thoughts about a specific topic you can be certain they have written and discussed it online before, so it should be simple to find this out. At the best conferences, the speakers will have thorough bios that point you to qualifications that make them good choices to discuss their specific topic. Remember, you are attending a conference to hear and learn things that you can’t find out yourself with a bit of time and a search engine. You’re paying. You have a right to expect quality presentations.

The last factor in deciding on the quality of the content is how it is presented. Will you be seeing a traditional speech, a presentation with a slideshow, a panel with several people discussing a particular topic or a round table where conference attendees have a discussion together? In the right context, all of these are great methods for learning something new.

Whether or not a certain format will prove valuable will depend on how much you already know about the subject. If you have deep knowledge on a particular topic, someone giving a slideshow aimed at a general audience probably won’t do much for you. This will be doubly true if there is no, or a limited opportunity to ask questions. Find out if the speakers will be taking open questions, or conducting a discussion at any point during their talk. The size of the audience is a factor as well. The smaller the audience watching is, the better chance you’ll have for asking questions or seeing if the speaker can address a certain aspect of their area of expertise. Most conferences usually detail the size of the various talks, panels and speeches, so factor these numbers into your decision making process.

If the conference offers a roundtable discussion, this can be another reason to attend, if the subject is one you know something about. A roundtable can go two ways. When a roundtable works, all the attendees will walk away with a much better understanding of the topic being discussed. You’ll also have the chance to share what you know, and help others learn. It’s also possible for roundtables to go off the rails. They might be dominated by one or two people with strong opinions, or devolve into petty arguments. There is no surefire way to see what type of roundtable you’ll end up with. However, experience goes a long way here. People that have run and attended many events like this will have a solid idea of how to run a session, so that everyone benefits. It’s worthwhile to check in with the organizers and inquire about their specific experience facilitating group discussions.

Socializing Socializing and networking can often be the best reason to attend a conference. Whether you are looking for new clients, vendors, partners or even just friends with similar interests, a conference is the easiest way to make this happen. You’ll definitely end up meeting people throughout the course of any conference, just by attending. Beyond that, find out what networking opportunities the conference provides.

Are there dinners, happy hours or specific times set aside to meet the other attendees? Does the conference provide any way to get in touch with other people before or after the actual conference? Will there be any opportunities to meet the speakers? The more opportunities the conference provides for you to meet people there, the more valuable the conference will become to you. Definitely investigate the time set aside by the conference for being social. To some people this may seem like a throwaway, but I would recommend you weigh the social aspects as heavily as you do the other factors when making your decision whether or not to attend. Some of the best experiences I’ve had at conferences have been at a bar, discussing what I heard that day, over a beer or six with new like minded friends I met earlier that day. Don’t write-off the nightlife!

Miscellaneous *Swag! – Sometimes conferences will promise you an “Awesome Swag Bag, with more than $500 worth of goodies!” These bags will always be filled with crap. Never let the possibility of getting something good in a swag bag sway your decision to attend a conference.

*Meet and Greet With Your Favorite Gurus and Mavens! – A meet and greet will always be an awkward, unsatisfying event. Generally, you and everyone else at the conference will crowd into a media room at a hotel. People will sidle up to the Internet Famous and make small talk. Everyone will realize how socially strange the situation is, and no meaningful conversation will ever occur. Meet and greets are never a good reason to decide to attend a conference.

There are so many types of conferences up and running now, that it is nearly impossible to create a definitive guide to attending them. What we’ve laid out here is a framework that we think is a solid jumping off point that can make the decision process easier. Most of all, we recommend doing your research asking lots of questions and having a clear idea of what you want to gain by attending. With so many events in the tech world, the decision of which ones to attend is getting harder. There are a lot of really terrible conferences out there. There are quite a few fantastic ones. We hope this guide helps you find the great ones. If you see us at a conference, make sure to say “Hi!” If we’re there you’ll know it’s a great one. Please drop us a comment on how you decide which events to attend and which ones to let pass you by.

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Getting ready to leave work is a harrowing experience. I’ve checked
and doubled checked, and everything is covered. I’ve got an extremely
capable couple of partners manning the desks back at the ranch. Still,
it’s hard to shake that “what did I forget” feeling.

While I’m away, I hope to be taking tons of photos with my new camera. I’ve got what feels like 100 pounds of art supplies packed and ready too. Creatively, this should be a blast.

I’m back September 1, and I’ve got a couple of big announcements to make when I’m back. Enjoy the rest of August everyone!

WordPress 2.5 is
available today for a sneak peek. It looks like the most major overhaul
to date of the entire backend. I’m going to install it on a test
account. Unless you backup your own blog daily, don’t use this test
version.

We’ve been very hard at work over at PrimetimePolitics.com
adding new features and refining the design. The Featured Debate is now
loading using Ajax, which speeds up the page load quite dramatically. I
also recently added a bit of javascript that pulls in the favicons of
the sites we’re linking to, which gives an immediate visual cue to what
the site is about.

The hard work is really paying off. We’ve seen average daily visits
jump from the low hundreds to 1100+ in just a few days. Of course, the content might have something to do with that.

We’ll be rolling out a very cool addition to the site early next week
that we hope will really increase the usefulness of this already useful
site.  Stay tuned for more!