Star Trek Saturday, Episode One

We're excited to kick off our first Star Trek Saturday! If you happened to just bump into this blog entry here's what we're doing:
Starting today, each week we will be posting one Star Trek episode in its entirety, and in chronological order. We want lifelong fans and newbies to come together for this community viewing experience. Your comments on each episode are what will really drive the community. Again, if you've never watched a minute of Star Trek before, don't be afraid to join in.

Also, a huge thanks to Fancast and CBS for making these episodes available for posting. 

Since this is the first episode, let's get some feedback on how the episodes are presented: Should we include a brief synopsis, or should each episode be a fresh surprise? Let's leave the fun factoids for the comments, but feel free to share them.

Also, please remember the ads during the show support fancast and CBS in making the stream possible. To help us bring this community feature, please consider shopping at Amazon using this link. Heck, maybe, just maybe, some Star Trek items will catch your eye.

We Want Your Videos!

The great thing about the Apple community is the amount of creative people, especially when it comes to video. From the beginning, we've wanted our video channel to be reflective of the community as a whole. So we want you to be part of TheDigitalLifestyle.tv If you've already made some sort of Apple-related, or technology-related video, whether it's funny, insightful, instructional, or otherwise, let us know, and we might just add it to the TDL video loop lineup. Also, if you've ever thought about doing your own Apple / tech show, now would be a great time to start. Use our contact form, and tell us where to find your videos (or leave a comment below.)

Help us broaden the depth of Apple video content on TheDigitalLifestyle.tv and make it an Apple community.

Thanks!

Whatever happened to iMix?

When Apple introduces a new feature, it's usually done quite carefully, and you can count on it being a hit. But what happens when a new feature is added, hundreds of thousands of people use it, then the Apple community seems to collectively forget about it? I'm talking about iMix.

A few iterations of iTunes ago, iMix was added as a way for people to create and share their own personal playlists with the masses. Hey, with all the social networking hullabaloo, it looked like a sure-fire hit. And indeed, there are over 1.3 million playlists uploaded according to Apple. If you're new to iTunes though, you may not have even known the feature exists. iMix is still part of iTunes, but the prominent link on the main page is gone. To get to it, search for "iMix" in the search field, then look in the "related" field in the results.

Why has iMix fallen off the map? Has the community aspect of iTunes been pushed aside to make room for higher profit sections like movie rentals? Are people still using iMix? Does anyone care? Well, a lot of music marketers and advertisers should care. Imagine the information that can be gained about the popularity of particular songs/artists from the iMix lists. And iMix could be a great resource. Let's say you're planning a wedding, and looking for just the right playlist. what better way to start than to see the playlists of other like-minded iTunes users. If you do an iTunes search of "wedding songs" there are no iMix results, and there's not even a way to search iMix. However, if you navigate to the iMix page, by first following the directions above to find it, there are over 100 wedding song playlists, rated by users like you.

iMix can and should be the cornerstone of a new social networking/community component of iTunes, instead of being a wallflower at the largest online (and beyond?) music retailer.