The "nesting instinct" has kicked in for both my wife and me with the bebe arriving any day now.  While she's focused on the nursery, strollers, and clothes, my focus is in the digital realm.  I'm getting ready to share photos and videos of our first born, of course!  So far we've upgraded our cameras (and entered the world of digital SLR photography, which before this weekend I knew nothing about - thanks Trevin!) and figured out how we're going to get photos to our family distributed all over the U.S.

But the nut I haven't cracked yet, now that this project has grown beyond its original intentions, is how we're going to organize the billions of photos we're going to take.  To-date, our organization system is really pretty simple: when we import photos from our camera, they get a name + date which maps to a folder (something like "Boat ride, August 2007").  We have 805 of these folders now since we've been taking digital photos and scanning others since the late 90s.  But is it enough?  Will we ever want more than this?

Windows Live Photo Gallery supports tags, ratings, and captions, writes this data to the file via XMP, and has a "truth is in the file" mentality so you can rest easy that metadata you add to your photos today will be useful tomorrow or in another application like Photoshop or SmugMug.  This leads to local photos being the "master" copy (aka digital negative) since you can apply captions and tags once, and then use them elsewhere with no additional effort.  Spaces doesn't support this yet, but I'd bet people are talking about it in the halls.

Photo Gallery even makes it easy to do this when you import - check it out:

Which leads me to my question: how should I use metadata on photos?  I'm not going to go crazy with this and spend hundreds of hours applying tags to previous photos (at least I don't think I am) but I do want to come up with a mental model that works so that when I find a photo that I want tagged, I can tag it on the spot without cluttering some other view up.  This is what I'm thinking:

• Use the folder name as a title/category (i.e. "Christmas Party, December 2007")
• Use the file name as the "name" of the photo (i.e. "Jay and Robin")
• Use the caption as the "description" of the photo (i.e. "Can you believe she's gotten so big?")
• Use tags to describe the contents of individual photos (i.e. skyline, smiling, happy, funny)
• Use tags to indicate who is in the photo (i.e. Mike Torres, Jay Fluegel, Trevin Chow) using standard names.  Of course I don't know if multiple words is part of XMP but I'll find out.
• Use geotags at some point in the distant future to describe location (once GPS is as prevalent as Wi-Fi as I'm not doing this by hand) In the meantime, use tags for location (i.e. Seattle, L.A., New Jersey)

So the question is: what am I missing here?  I'm not even sure this is right.  Should the caption be the name and the description be something else?  I don't know.

Back in 1997/1998 when we were building out Jump.com, one of the "killer scenarios" we were hoping to enable with our new online calendar was sharing between spouses/families.  Fast-forward a full DECADE and today marks the day that I am finally able to see my wife's calendar, and have her see mine.  It's glorious. 

The reason it took so long was because we both rely 100% on our office calendars, and both of the companies we work for use Exchange servers.  Exchange was designed to make intra-office calendar sharing a piece of cake, but never had any real support for sharing calendars between two "Internet users" until Outlook 2007 calendar sharing via iCal arrived.  This is one of those features that for some reason no one I talk to even knows about, but it's great.  Sure, we could have enabled calendar sharing over the years with MSN Calendar (which is the evolution of Jump.com!) or with Google Calendar, but neither of those calendars work at all with our calendars at work.

Today, my wife's company upgraded to Office 2007 and we immediately setup calendar sharing between us.  Now when I go into my calendar, my wife's calendar appears right next to mine - I even turned on overlay mode just for fun, so I can see her appointments super-imposed on top of mine.  Looks like she'll be in my building later today ;)

The reason this is so exciting is that it will likely cut down on ~20% of our random IMs and emails about scheduling dinners, travel, "what are you doing tonight?", etc.  Gotta love those little life hacks that make life a little easier!

This is an overview of how Outlook 2007 calendar sharing works if you're interested: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA100398301033.aspx

This is wild.

DreamScene, which most of you probably know about from CES in January, has just been released as a Windows Vista Ultimate Extra.  It's truly breathtaking when you find the "right" video to use.  What I didn't realize was that Stardock came out with a plug-in to the plug-in called DeskScapes which not only gives you access to hundreds of Dream files for your desktop, but also does some crazy stuff:

DeskScapes enriches and extends ordinary Dream files by allowing users to add dynamic content to their animated wallpapers.  For example, have your Dreams change automatically based on time of day or local weather.

Slick.  If you have Ultimate and a powerful enough machine, this stuff is hypnotizing.  It's really worth seeing in action.  All of a sudden, my Vista machine became a lot cooler looking than my Mac -- which looks surprisingly dated!  More information on Dreams:

Dreams are high quality animated wallpapers that run exclusively on Windows Vista Ultimate and transform the static desktop users spend all day looking at into a world of motion and activity.

Dreams are subtle, looped motion videos or animations that bring new life to the desktop without slowing down your PC. Watch a serene nature scene while you type an email. Glance at a meteor shower as you work on a document. Make your desktop interesting again with Windows DreamScene and Windows Vista Ultimate.

Read more about Dreams

Thanks to Ed Bott for re-introducing me to IE7Pro the other day after lunch.  Why did I wait so long to install this thing?  It's a super-simple download and brings all the cool features of those other browsers to IE7.  It's going to take me some time to get used to it and figure out all the things I can do, but so far I'm really, really enjoying inline search, form spell check, super drag-drop, crash recovery and ad blocking (while I would never look for an ad blocker, I wouldn't turn one off either if it's turned on by default as it is here).

Here are all the nifty features of IE7Pro:

IE7Pro is a must have add-on for Internet Explorer, which includes a lot of features and tweaks to make your IE friendlier, more useful, secure and customizable. IE7Pro includes Tabbed Browsing Management, Spell Check, Inline Search, Super Drag Drop, Crash Recovery, Proxy Switcher, Mouse Gesture, Tab History Browser, Web Accelerator, User Agent Switcher, Webpage Capturer, AD Blocker, Flash Block, Greasemonkey like User Scripts platform, User Plug-ins and many more power packed features. You can customize not just Internet Explorer, but even your favorite website according to your need and taste using IE7Pro.

If you like IE7 but want some of these more advanced features, you should totally give it a shot.

By the way, I should be a father within 3 or 4 weeks, likely sooner.  Pretty crazy time.

Paul has a good write-up on the Windows Live suite beta.  I always enjoy reading what Paul has to say because he just gets Microsoft so well; I guess that's his "gift" for covering the company as long as he has.  Some call him a Microsoft apologist but I don't see it that way.  He calls it like it is; when he thinks we do something stupid, he's the first to say so.  Good thing he likes the suite ;)

This year, however, Microsoft shifted gears and "software + services" went along for the ride. As I now understand it, Microsoft plans to provide customers with the solutions they need, regardless of how they're delivered. This plan spans the range from true services, such as Web services that expose functionality via published interfaces but have no GUI in the classic sense, to online services that integrate with UI bits, such as Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail, and the like, and then more traditional PC-based software that speaks back to the so-called cloud.

...

Applications like Windows Live Mail and Photo Gallery are better than their predecessors in Windows Vista, and work with a growing lineup of online services. Messenger is a first class IM application that's turning into an all-around communications tool. For bloggers of any stripe, Windows Live Writer is a surprisingly capable application, and well worth evaluating. And Windows Live Family Safety could be that key online security piece you were looking for. This is an interesting suite, and it's only going to get better. Highly recommended, even in beta form.

Read more -> Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Windows Live Suite Preview

This is from an article on CNET News.com:

"Over time you'd like to have the service so that all your photos were available from any device, not just the ones you put in your photo album, and that it was easy to have those things backed up, to have them with the resolution you want, and then to have very collaborative experiences with pictures," Jones said.

"So, that you can see with photos we've taken a big step in this release of Windows Live, but we've got more to do."

The same goes for file sharing, he said. "We have a cloud-based way to do file sharing called SkyDrive, and then we have a peer-to-peer based way to do it called FolderShare," Jones said. "Well, over time it might make sense for us to really start to make that experience be seamless so you could get to all your files from anywhere."

Those two are just the first pieces in what Microsoft hopes will be an entire Live infrastructure that developers can write on top of, much the way they write programs that run on top of Windows today. It's a notion that some have dubbed a "cloud OS."

This is an interesting and fair write-up of some of our online initiatives.  If you read the whole thing, you'll get a feel for where Windows Live is headed.  The direction is exciting, and it's the first time since November 2005 (the launch) that I think it's being clearly articulated. 

I'm also happy to say that I see Windows Live working for Internet "enthusiasts" like me more and more, and that's a huge relief.  There's nothing worse than saying "I don't use it, but I recommend that you do."  I see myself slowly migrating to a bunch of our services - and for those I don't want to use, I know Windows Live will work well with many of them too.

Exciting stuff.

Microsoft opening up on the Web | CNET News.com

I just finished watching the Apple keynote from earlier today.  Two things occurred to me while I was ooohing and ahhing over the iPod nano, iPod touch and the amazing $200 price drop on the iPhone (wow to you suckers who just bought one!  It's fun to be an early adopter these days!)

1. The iPod Touch is great with a nice big screen.  And the 160GB model with the tiny little screen is great too - for music, not video.  In order to really be an adequate video + music device, they really need to have one device with both a large screen AND large storage capacity.  I don't see how only one of these is at all sufficient for a real video + music device.  It's a strange choice considering how great the devices are otherwise.  I would have preferred a slightly thicker device to accommodate 50GB+.
   
2. The real killer application for video (provided #1 is addressed) is to take television shows with you on-the-go FOR FREE.  Having to pay some ridiculous fee for a show you're already paying your cable company $59/mo to watch is crazy - but if you can use Tivo or Windows Media Center to record a show and (wirelessly?) transfer it automatically to your portable device nearby, that would be truly great.  Forget iTunes lock-in.

Now, I have no idea what's in store for Zune 2.  But I think there's an opportunity with Zune to get some of these things right before Apple does.  The shareholder in me hopes we can do it because it could be a real differentiator.

Side note: I wish Apple just ditched Wi-Fi completely on the iPod Touch and instead just partnered with AT&T for a cheap data-only plan (i.e. $10/mo).  I almost never used Wi-Fi on my PPC-6700 phone for the year that I had it - I had NO need for it whatsoever with 3G built into the thing - and EV-DO was far more ubiquitous, fast enough, and much easier to use.  It's a total pain to get onto most Wi-Fi networks ($5.99 hourly fee?  Type a 128-bit WEP key?!) but getting onto a cell network is a breeze.  I'm sure Apple has something up their sleeves with this (namely bypassing the carriers) but Wi-Fi is just too limited; I wonder how many people will ever use Safari on the iPod Touch.

Also: speculation.  Is the reason they called it the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store because it won't work with the iPhone over EDGE?  It's pretty dumb to name a product after a protocol codename - will they also have an iTunes EDGE Music Store?  Or iTunes HSDPA Music Store?  Or is the "one last thing" Steve forgot to mention that the Wi-Fi Music Store will only work if you're connected via Wi-Fi?  If so, that would be ridiculous.  Anyone know?

Within the last 24 hours, a bunch of new things from Microsoft and Apple dropped and Techmeme has been hopping all day:

• Silverlight 1.0
• New iPods
• Windows Live suite (new unified installer!)

Each one is totally exciting for different reasons, and of course each deserves its own write-up.  But I haven't been much of a blogger these days - it isn't that I don't love blogging (I do) or that I have fewer things to say (I don't), it's just that there's more and more stuff competing for my time every single day.  So I'm trying to be more selective, especially with a baby on the way.

But of course, I do have some quick thoughts to add on each of these announcements:

Silverlight 1.0 looks great, and I'm incredibly impressed with what the team has pulled off.  The real watershed moment will be when 1.1 is released with the .NET Framework support though - that thing is a true game changer.  In the meantime, I expect a number of video sites to start to use Silverlight in interesting new ways.

The new iPods are exactly what I expected (down to the Starbucks deal) and they're stunning.  But I'm not sure I get the real desire to drop $299 for an 8GB player, which certainly won't hold much video, when you can get the 160GB version for $249 - albeit with a slightly smaller screen.  What I'd really want is an 80->160GB player with the iPod Touch or iPhone size screen - now that would be my ideal "bus device".  Of course, it's typical of me to want more than I can get ;)  Apple impressed with these announcements.

The Windows Live suite is finally out in beta form with Mail, Messenger, Photo Gallery, OneCare, Family Safety, Writer, and Toolbar.  There are new versions of just about everything!  I would definitely give Photo Gallery a try as a Spaces user... there are all sorts of great features including VERY simple publishing (high-res!) to Spaces.

You can read more about the suite here from Chris Jones, and install it from here!