Upload your music to LaLa – now! I have had about 100 GB of music on an external hard drive for about 3.5 years now. The problem with having all your music on drive (beside the potential for drive failure / data loss) is that you must have the drive around (or remote access to your machine) to listen to the tunes. I decided a while back on backing up my entire hard drive to a personal Amazon S3 account (and if you’re a PC user, you can use this free S3 backup program for doing so). But even direct cloud backup doesn’t solve the playback issue because you must map your iTunes library to your cloud drive, which can be accomplished with services like JungleDisk (which I don’t recommend because it’s clunky and costly). Anyways, the solution is LaLa, which is now owned by Apple. Upload your music to LaLa for free, and stream your entire .mp3 collection from any computer, any time, without the worries of hard drive failure and loss of data. Your tracks will forever reside on LaLa’s servers and Apple will float the storage and backup bills for you. You’ll be happy you did it.
If you like blogging, or want to try blogging, I highly recommend Posterous. It’s a dead simple way of blogging. In short, you can email any media (text, photos, video, audio, etc.) into posterous and and it will post to your posterous blog. You can also set it up to auto-post to a self hosted WordPress blog, Twitter, Facebook, and pretty much any social media outlet under the sun. At first I thought it was just another over hyped service that I didn’t need because one post photos and video to a blog via email through Flickr. In addition to Flickr email to blog posting, WordPress has it’s own built in functionality that allows you to make new posts to a WordPress blog via email, but when I went to test out WordPress’ email option, I couldn’t get it to work. WordPress is great, but this one little feature is not so great and it’s malfunction is the sole reason that I discovered Posterous. While I had demo’d Posterous (and Tumblr) in the past, I had no use for the service until I ran into the “post to wordpress via email” problem, which Posterous easily resolved. By setting up a Posterous account and inputting my blog URL and login creds, I am now easily able to create new posts on the fly, via email. Posterous is slick.
