This conversation about the next web and putting content up for sale through exclusivity has been a hot button issue for the last few days and worth some more thought. Notice I said, exclusivity' and I'm not calling it scarcity because it's not. Nor am I calling it a paywall'.

Paywall' being the prevailing label for this shift as media companies and independent publishers attempt to stay afloat and producing content by opening their doors to those that have paid admission. I will occasionally refer to it as such. I will also refer to it as patronage.

Like the arts or the movement to support local business, publishers of all stripes need revenue to produce content from information they have. If that revenue comes from their public supporters, so be it.

As an example, we pay admission to movies, concerts and meetups because we have an understanding that if we don't there won't be any more of them. Theaters would go away. Bands would lose their main source of income. Meetups would disappear or be held in some nerd's basement with room for five people and a big OSHA FAIL.

The value that we find in the art of entertainment or having a few drinks with friends that share our common interests is measured first by the price of admission. It is measured second by the amount of pleasure we receive from the information, conversations and moving images.

Information is art. Information is a common interest. Businesses that are in information verticals require patronage.

Does this mean that all information needs to be paid for? Yes. Paid for by you? No.

There needs to be balance in the argument that content and information want to be free. They can be free to consumers, but someone has to pay for them. Whether is through advertising dollars, paid partnership or subscription fees, the production of the content from information is a cost. Content wants to be syndicated, not free.

Those that argue that content wants to be free can have their cake and eat it too if the places that they choose to get it from are covering the costs of production or aggregation. And in this case it is free to consumers if the business at the end point is covering its operating costs with advertising dollars, lead generation or other model.

But if the content is direct to consumers, patronage is the only way to guarantee that even a small portion of it will exist in a few years. Else, you should get used to content solely full of information about the stars you pay to see on stage and screen.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lolololori/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Content Wants To Be Syndicated, Not Free. is a post from: TechStartups.com

When it comes to deciding what direction you should take your next great idea it is helpful to sort out what you want from the startup.

In every case you should be answering that with revenue. But, also at the top of that list should be your decision of going for VC backing or turning your idea into a lifestyle startup.

A VC backed startup is a different beast than a lifestyle startup.

Lifestyle startups in this case being a business that you start and run to make your living from. The type of startup that you hope to sell for better than $500k so you can float till the next idea comes along or simply a business that dissolves into your next business based on a newer greater idea. It is a two to three year investment of your time that pays dividends closer to a traditional mom and pop type business.

Here are five reasons you should choose a lifestyle startup:

1. You've got a lot of passion (read: hard headed)

There's not much to say about this one.

Being the captain of your own destiny is something that you thrive on and know that the only way you can make this startup work is with your vision.

That, and if someone recommended how to do something differently there might be a physical altercation. You might get to this point if your idea has elements of the next reason.

2. You're idea is future forward (read: hard to pitch)

At your first pitch to a VC you're told that you should integrate X service. Of course, X, being the hottest new startup that isn't even in their portfolio. This is the moment you should realize that your pitch has failed for any number of reasons. On the ride back to the airport you run through the list of variables with friends and realize that idea if solving a future problem. One that is a little farther in the future than you are going to be able to pitch successful for funding. And that's cool.

Without pulling back the scale of your vision too much, you should look for an opportunity to move forward building it out. Especially, if you got number 3 covered.

3. You can really focus (read: blinded by desire to succeed)

You're a competitive freak that is only competing with yourself. Really. You might be a laid back person but you've got an inner desire to win that could turn a three legged pony into a stakes winner.

This in turn gives you an ability to focus on a business plan or road map with precision. It aids you in your ability to execute at a C-Level all the while handling low level strategy and tactics. This is how you make your startup profitable. That brings me to number 4.

4. You understand physical labor (read: you grew up on or near a farm)

Look manual labor of the farming variety is enough to skew the tables greatly in comparison to a tech startup. Waking up at 3:30 a.m. to milk and feed cows followed by a day of bailing hay, walking beans or other intense physical labor makes working at a startup a piece of cake. Sure, you'll be working all the time, just like the farm but you're going to be using a different set of skills and attributes that aren't as physically demanding.

However, if you found that this type of physical labor suited you, a lifestyle startup could be for you. See number 5.

5. You need to always be working (read: hobby is job/job is hobby)

You eat, sleep, breathe your idea. When you are in the shower you are solving problems from the night before while you take a huff of your bar soap. You find great satisfaction it the ability to get work done in your down times while you should be relaxing.

I don't think this one is very healthy, but for many people it is a reality and something that would be difficult for you to change. This behavior is learned or is a mechanism to avert from another issue . . . either way the behavior is ingrained in you and should be embraced as an asset for building a successful lifestyle business.

Lifestyle startups can be very rewarding for those that enjoy having the ability see their ideas blossom. They're also a great fit for those that aren't ready to jump into the startup world with both feet. If you've got a job or career that can keep you afloat while you dabble with a startup, this one is for you.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

The Lifestyle Startup 5 Reasons to Do It is a post from: TechStartups.com

The last time I heard the term "thought leader", I thought, "There ought to be a little anniversary present to mark the three millionth time you hear a buzzword."

That may be my biggest complaint about buzzwords and jargon: not that they're often impenetrable to outsiders, and not that they often mask a lack of clarity on the speaker's part, but because they take perfectly good phrases - phrases with power, phrases with innovation and meaning - and suck the life out of them through overuse.

Sponsor

Got a social media buzzword or catch phrase you'd like to lay to rest... or maybe reclaim and restore to life? (Say, "social media", for instance?)

Happy Birthday!

By the way, this marks the first anniversary of Noise to Signal on Read Write Web. I've made a birthday cake but, uh, since you're not here, well, I'll just have to eat it myself. For the past year, I've been whipping up weekly cartoons, Richard has been gamely publishing them and you've been so kind as to read them.

Thanks for that. And thanks for every comment, Digg, tweet, stumble and Delicious-ifying. I hope that you'll keep reading them in the year to come... and that you'll enjoy them as much as I enjoy drawing them.

Ed: Thanks Rob, I've thoroughly enjoyed the weekly funnies! It's given RWW a sense of humor that sometimes we're accused of not having (being serious types) ;-) Here's to many more classic Rob Cottingham cartoons over the next year.

More Noise to Signal

Ryan Scherf has created a simple jQuery plugin that "uses Mobile Safari's built in touch events to allow jQuery binding of swipe events to any DOM element. You can override the swipeLeft and swipeRight defaults functions to create your own custom process when the gesture is detected."

It can be used as simple as:

You can tweak the threshold for the swipe, and take a peak at the demo which is shown here:

Jon Raasch has also updated his QuickFlip plugin that flips any piece of HTML like a card. The flip effect is similar to the UI animation on the iPhone, and uses an animation trick that is barely noticeable when fired quickly.

QuickFlip 2 resolves a number of usability and performance issues in
QuickFlip. The $.quickFlip() function can now be chained from any
jQuery selector, attaching all the styling and markup it needs
automatically. Additionally a new $.quickFlipper() function makes
triggering the flip effect a piece of cake. Other than that, minor
bugs have been fixed and performance has been tuned.

For more info:

• see the docs
• check out the examples

A lady in NY followed the same procedure and ordered a birthday cake over email but here's what they delivered on her birthday - a cake with some HTML icing.

It turned out that she used Microsoft Outlook to send her email but Wegman's email system failed to recognize the proprietary HTML tags of Outlook and hence this goof-up.

This is best explained by an employee of Wegman - "we just cut and paste from the email to the program we use for printing the edible images, we are usually in such a hurry that we really don't have time to check. and if we do the customers yell at us for bothering them."

Also see: Cake Design for Geeks

How Microsoft Outlook Ruined Her Birthday Cake ? - Digital Inspiration

The Brainstorm

Save The Date

The Invitation

Pre-Press

Finished Product

Custom Stamps

The Event

The Photobooth

The Gifts

The Ring

Finally, Something Cool From Noby

Phew

</div

My friend Julia & I just bought a vacation home in Detroit. It's a small but comfortable three-bedroom house in good condition that sits on a shorefront plot of land along the banks of an actual river. The location is serene, and the price was right the whole thing cost less than a new Cadillac Escalade. A lot less, actually. But that was only part of the appeal. Just as important to us was the idea that Detroit is poised to become a laboratory for the latest social trend: The Greening of America.

Sure, Detroit may be the scariest place you can think of to live or even visit. Or is it? With the decline of the American auto industry, over seventy percent of the city's populace fled to the burbs between 1966 and 1990. For those who remained, heroin and crack cocaine savaged the city's neighborhoods. Yet when everyone else moved away, most of the thugs did too, leaving huge swaths of once-dense urban blocks very nearly depopulated and quite a bit greener.

The nightmarish view of downtown Detroit and its suburbs is ancient history. The city is currently home to a strong (though small by coast-city standards) art scene. Wayne State University is becoming known for it's cutting-edge gallery shows, while older artists have contributed much to Detroit's exceptional public art installations. Detroit is also the epicenter of the Urban Adventure movement, with intrepid explorers coming from as far away as Europe and Australia to clandestinely explore the city's beautifully decaying factories, mansions, hotels, mental hospitals, and skyscrapers.

Most of all, though, Detroit is already one of the greenest cities in America. I mean green as in green grass! Visit any typical residential block in the heart of Detroit, and what do you see? A handful of occupied houses and a few piles of rubble that once were homes, while the rest of the block has completely reverted back to nature. Rabbits, possum, raccoons, and the occasional deer ramble through this urban landscape as though they own it. We've gone canoeing along Detroit's storied River Rouge canal, and we've climbed the abandoned, 37-story {REDACTED}* Building to get an up-close view of a peregrine falcon nest. Detroit's public transportation system is no worse than that of most other American cities, and it'll only improve as the renaissance continues. Also oddly enough, the city has one of the newest and best freeway networks in the country great biking and roller-skating lanes for when we run out of oil. Homeowners can plant gardens on their spacious lots or those next door as they like.

The price of owning anything in San Francisco, Brooklyn, L.A. or any other prime location became prohibitive, even surreal long ago. Even with the recent downturn in the housing market, it is still impossible for most artists, writers or craftsmen to buy in these places. Meanwhile, the industrial engine of the Rust Belt continues to freeze up, providing green spaces in cities like Detroit. At the same time, more people are able to work from literally anywhere in various Internet and computer related jobs. Being able to break away from the overcrowding and frenetic pace of life on the coast(s) for long periods and kick back in a relaxed tree shaded waterfront home that we actually own outright is a luxury that, I for one, after thirty years in Frisco never thought I would know. Detroit has plenty of water, green trees, wide-open land and no crucial military targets. Everyone world round thinks it's a dump. There's no place to go but up for this town. The icing on the cake is the simple fact that no one will ever waste a Nuke on Detroit.

Ghetto Ice Cream Truck driving through a Detroit neighborhood. [via Urlesque]

A similar article was published in Everywhere Magazine Issue 04.

photos by Julia Solis

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed.

Escape to Detroit

[With apologies in advance to Martin Nisenholtz, who I believe is genuinely fighting the good fight, and who will no doubt end up with a great job at some fine Internet company.]

The hiring of Bill Kristol was the last straw.

I can't take it anymore.

I hereby inaugurate my New York Times Deathwatch, which will continue until the last Sulzberger has left the building.

Recent dispatches that are fit to print:

Leading the way [in terrible end-of-year news from the newspaper industry] was The New York Times Company, where total [quarterly] revenues fell 1.7% to $865.8 million, due mostly to a 4.1% drop in ad revenues... Advertising revenues at the news media group in particular fell 5.6%.

Source: Media Daily News.

Actually, that's being perhaps overly fair, since it takes into account an extra week last year. The straight year over year performance was:

[F]ourth-quarter revenue totaled $865.8 million, down 7.1% from $931.5 million a year earlier. The decline included a 9.1% drop in advertising revenue and a 4% fall in circulation revenue... [T]he company had an extra week in the final quarter of 2006, which boosted the year-earlier quarter's revenue by $50.8 million and its pretax income by $14.3 million.

Yes, we are dealing with a business where missing a single week means the difference between revenue falling 1.7% and 7.1%, and advertising revenue falling 4.1% and 9.1%. Go figure.

Source: Forbes.

Now, normally, beating up on someone like this isn't very much fun. But we are talking about a profession that specializes in passing judgment, often snide, on everyone else. And so, onward...

Turns out that December 2007 was particularly bad, and things may be getting even worse:

Separately, the [New York Times] reported that December ad revenue dropped 25.2%. Excluding an additional week in December 2006, ad revenue declined 12% for the month.

...[W]eakness across several national [advertising] categories including health care, books, technology products and transportation hampered results in the month. Classified ads, the traditional lifeblood of newspapers, saw steep declines in help-wanted, real estate and automotive sales. [Craig, you bad bad boy...]

"To date in January, the percentage decline in advertising revenue is trending similar to that of December..." said Janet Robinson, chief executive of New York Times...

As they say, sometimes it's darkest right before it goes pitch black.

Source: Marketwatch.

How are the company's other papers doing?

The [New York Times-owned] Boston Globe will soon announce cutbacks at the newspaper, including hundreds of layoffs, and an increase in the per copy price of the paper to 75 cents as of Feb. 1...

The Globe saw a nearly 7 percent decrease from 386,417 to 360,695 in its daily circulation between Sept. 2006 and Sept. 2007, according to numbers released in November by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That report showed the paper's Sunday circulation down about 6.5 percent...

When you have an obsolete, inconvenient physical product that nobody wants in an era of universal online access, the appropriate strategy is clearly to raise the price.

Source: Metro Boston, which amusingly itself is 49 percent owned by the Boston Globe, which is owned by the New York Times.

How about revenue at the Globe?

At the New England Media Group, which includes the Boston Globe, ad revenue fell nearly 16%. Circulation revenue fell 7%.

Source: Marketwatch.

How about the company's smaller newspapers?

The company's regional-media group, including papers in medium-sized markets such as Wilmington, N.C., and Santa Rosa, Calif., saw ad revenue decline almost 17%, while circulation fell 7.4%.

Source: Marketwatch.

Meanwhile, the Times faces its second assault from a major hedge fund in the last two years:

A hedge fund manager who acquired a stake in the New York Times Company and is pushing to gain seats on its board sent a letter to the company on Sunday in which he criticised directors as "ineffective" and called for it to shed more non-core assets.

Scott Galloway, founder of Firebrand Capital, who sent the letter, has joined with another hedge fund, Harbinger, to try to put forward their own nominees for the four independent seats on the media company's 13-member board at its meeting in April. The funds have amassed a combined 4.9 per cent stake in Times' shares.

Source: Financial Times.

An ineffective board? What could they be talking about?

Hmmmmm. That's not the direction you want to see those things go.

Well, given that the Internet is the central force dismantling the company's business, I'm sure that by now they've stocked their board with noted Internet experts. Let's see:

• Brenda C. Barnes -- CEO of Sara Lee; noted snack cake expert
• Raul E. Cesan -- former CEO of Schering-Plough; noted Levitra expert
• Daniel H. Cohen -- president of DeepSee LLC, "an oceanic exploration and submarine leasing company"; noted Jacques Cousteau expert
• Lynn G. Dolnick -- former head of exhibits for the National Zoologic Park in Washington DC; noted marsupial expert
• Michael Golden -- current publisher of the International Herald Tribune; former head of the company's Women's Publishing Division; noted sundress expert
• William E. Kennard -- former head of the FCC; noted "seven dirty words" expert
• James M. Kilts -- former CEO of Gillette; noted smooth, smooth shave expert; prior to that, unindicted coconspirator at Philip Morris; noted expert on your grandfather's hacking cough
• David E. Liddle -- here I have to take a pause as I actually know this one; based on what's happening at the company, it could be reasonably asked whether he's actually attending the board meetings.
• Ellen R. Marram -- former CEO of Nabisco; noted Oreo expert. Oh, wait, she actually ran an Internet company: "From 1999 until 2000, Ms. Marram was president and chief executive officer of efdex Inc. (the Electronic Food & Drink Exchange), an Internet-based commodities exchange for the food and beverage industry." Ooh. I wonder if that ended well.
• Thomas Middelhoff -- former CEO of Bertelsmann; noted expert on complicated family politics -- well, that's probably coming in handy...
• Janet L. Robinson -- current CEO of the New York Times Company; noted expert on horrific business implosions
• Doreen A. Toben -- CFO of Verizon; noted 30-year debenture expert
• And finally, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. -- the Big Kahuna -- the Man -- the Guy In Charge -- the chairman and scion -- the dude with the cojones to actually defend Judy Miller. Not noted Internet expert.

So, if you want to issue bonds to pay for FCC-approved snack cake manufacturing in a submarine on display at a national park by a sundress-wearing cigarette-puffing Levitra-popping Judy Miller, you're pretty much set.

Go team!

This column was originally published in the Sun-Times on January 31, 2008.

I had no idea how badly my home entertainment system here in the living room had gotten out of hand until a recent afternoon when I picked up the requisite basket of remotes and issued the usual sequence of baffling commands. But instead of the big screen showing the opening scenes of last night's Survivorman, it started to display page after page of decrypted attack orders for Nazi submarines.

I checked the huge tangle of cables and commands interconnecting my TV and the cable box and the DVD burner (andand). Well, I'll be damned: over the past four or five years of adding components to my setup, I'd gradually managed to reproduce the complex wiring and programming of Colossus, the British computer that broke the infernal codes of the Germans' top-secret ENIGMA encryption machine.

Surely you have a similar story to tell.

It really doesn't take very long for things to become a huge, confusing, honkin' mess. Your TV long-since stopped being a TV. It's a nexus for a half-dozen audio and video devices. Hence the need for the basket of remotes, and the need to maintain a mental map of which devices need to be switched through what other devices in order to send American Gladiators on its stately way from the cable tuner through the DVD recorder and then finally to the big screen.

Yup, you can walk into any store and plunk down eight to thirty dollars for a universal remote. But there comes a time when you're ready to bring a gun to a knife fight. When that day arrives, there's Logitech's Harmony One remote.

Let's do this quick, like ripping off a band-aid: it's $249.

(Move on to the next paragraph when you feel as though you're ready. You've had quite a shock; drink some juice or soda to replace the blood sugar you've lost.)

It's a lot of money. But the One actually represents a sensible middle ground. The truly expensive controllers cost three times as much and they're typically the size of an Etch-A-Sketch. The $30 ones replace a half-dozen remotes, and that's a terrific space-saver. But they don't really make your life any simplerparticularly when it comes time to program the remote with all of your device codes.

To set up the Harmony, you just plug it into the USB port of your PC or Mac and hand things off to a nice little app that collects a list of all of the devices you've got there in the living room along with their makes and model numbers. The app then connects to Logitech's servers and retrieves the proper codes for all of em. They've got codes for hundreds of thousands of devices; the only difficult thing about configuring the One was crawling behind my TV with a flashlight and a pen to get at the model number.

(Though it didn't have quite the right codes for my Apple TV. The good news was that teaching the Harmony was a piece of cake. Even this part of the passion play was guided by the desktop software. Just check off all of the commands you want to record, and the app walks you through the list one by one.)

But once you've described all of your gear, send the codes to the remote, and un-dock it, the Harmony will control all of your gear automatically. Commands are automatically grouped into actions sequences of commands that handle common tasks. The One's gorgeous color touchscreen doesn't feature tawdry buttons like Input Select or Closed-Captioning. You can get to those buttons if you wish, but you're paying $250 for the big button marked Listen to Music. The Harmony understand that when I listen to music, the TV and the Apple TV need to be on, the TV needs to be on Video 4, and all other devices can be shut off to save energy.

The remote itself is no dummy, either. As it happened, I'd given the app the wrong info: I'd told it that my Apple TV was connected to Video 3. When I tapped Listen to Music and the TV switched over to the TiVO, I grumbled and pressed the remote's Help button, expecting the remote to do something brilliant like say Check the manual.

Instead, it gave me interactive tech support.

Is the TV on? it asked.

(Erryes.)

Is the Apple TV on? (yes)

Is the TV switched to the right input? (no).

The TV suddenly switched from Video 3 to Video 4.

Is the TV switched to the right input now? (yup).

Did that fix the problem?

True, it's no different than dealing with any corporate IT department: someone with curt social skills who clearly thinks you're a moron asks you a series of condescending questions. But you are, a moron and it did fix the problem and it's not as though you have to invite it to your big barbecue this weekend or anything.

My only real complaints about the Harmony One are of the Well, jeez, for $250 you ought to be able to variety. For instance, you can build a custom Action, but the individual keypresses available to you are limited to powering up devices and switching inputs. I'd love to be able to set up a one-touch button that says I want to pipe this video through my DVD recorder and start recording immediately but no can do, apparently.

Also: it's an Apple (Freaking) TV. For $250, I shouldn't have to see it described by the touchscreen as Media Center PC.

The other problem is out of the Harmony's control. It can send commands to your components, but it gets no feedback to confirm that those commands were received and that the component is set the way the remote thinks it is. If your TV has a remote command that switches it directly to Video 2 (your TiVO), you're good. If it just has a single Video Input button that cycles through all of the possible connections, the fuse is lit on a powderkeg of vinegary disappointment. The Harmony has to drive blind, pretty much. As often as not, after tapping one of these fabled Action buttons, I need to select the proper input manually.

The Harmony One's best feature might actually be its shape. It's perfectly sculpted for the human hand, which is what I'm equipped with. The size, shape and placement of its physical buttons is cozy and nicely thought out; it's an uncluttered and welcoming arrangement. Overall, the remote's shape and button layout makes you want to cancel your gym membership and watch more TV.

This really hits home when you compare the One to the Harmony 550. The 550 is designed much more like a conventional remote (with a clunky shape and cluttered keypad) and it lacks the One's gorgeous color touchscreen. But it retains the One's killer feature (you can program it via USB)and it costs just $90 online.

But come on. Between the plasma screen and the hi-def DVD player and the $700 game console, you've already got $4000 tied up in that system. Your opportunity to prove that you value your kids' college education more than you value a kick-ass rec room sailed away a long, long time ago.

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Gallery: Sweet, delicious swag: Sony sends PS3 birthday cakes to the press

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

CNET
The 80GB Zune cuts a much slimmer figure than its bricklike older brother. Measuring 4.3 inches high by 2.4 inches wide by 0.5 inch deep, Microsoft shaved some considerable bulk off the Zune's thickness, while nearly tripling its capacity...we believe the latest crop of Zunes should finally take hold as a true iPod alternative. (83/100)

PCWorld
All of the new Zunes are built around a rounded touch-sensitive control that also doubles as a clickable d-pad-style controler, much like the Click Wheel on Apple's iPods. Flick your thumb up or down the pad repeatedly, and you begin to build up momentum while scrolling through long lists. At any time, you can tap to stop the scrolling, though it will eventually come to stop naturally. In my experience, it's a very fun way to navigate through a music collection, even in a long view of artists on the 80GB player...All in all, the 80GB Zune is a decent choice as an 80GB MP3 player. (no score at this time)

Wired
Video performance is very good, with the screen size really helping...Battery life didn't meet the published specs of 20 hours for music and 4 hours for video with the Wi-Fi turned off. My rundown test on music was 18 hours, and video was 3.5 hours, which is, you know, fine.... Would I recommend the Zune? Yeah, I think I would. If you're not invested in the iPod/iTunes ecosystem, it's the most polished competitor I've used to date. Especially if you're looking for a subscription service, the integration of player and service just crushes everyone else. (6/10)

YahooTech
...the most innovative new feature on the Zune: wireless syncing. Setup was a piece of cake: you just connect the Zune to your PC via USB, fire up the Zune software, and enable wireless syncing under the Settings menu. If your system is already connected to a wireless network, those settings are transferred to the Zune automaticallyno need to key in the access point name or password...automatic syncing only works when the Zune is plugged into its charging dock. Overall, I thought wireless syncing worked pretty seamlessly, and I loved being able to sync new songs and playlists over the air (why can't the iPhone or the iPod Touch do this?)

Dean Takahashi
The Zune Marketplace website looks better than iTunes because it feels less like a spreadsheet. It still uses the MTV Urge back-end but is completely redesigned.... All of these things represent improvements that allow Microsoft to claim that it is going its own way. Clearly, they aren't copying Apple...At this rate of improvement, Microsoft will be a contender. But it has a long way to go before it keeps Steve Jobs up at night.

- Zune fans should be happy with the improvements, but even more, that the big new features are software based and free for everyone.

File Sharing

Both OS X and Windows can see each other's shared drives over the local network. To mount a Mac's shared drive on a PC, it's a simple matter of enabling Windows Sharing in System Preferences and browsing to the shared folder the way you would on any other PC. Here's a step by step rundown for accessing a Mac's files on your PC. Update: Reader Jeremy writes in with more information on how to get Windows Vista to see Mac-shared folders. Thanks, Jeremy!

By default, OS X shares only your home folder. To share out another location on your Maclike, say, an external drive that houses all your media filesuse the free SharePoints System Preferences pane to configure advanced sharing.

To go the other way around and see your PC's files on the Mac, use Finder's built-in support for Samba, a network file-sharing protocol. Here are the details on mounting a shared Windows folder on your Mac.

File and Application Compatibility

But while you're unlikely to run into filetype compatibility issues, Mac newbs should know that applications are not compatible across operating systems. That is, if you buy Microsoft Office for Windows, you've got to buy a whole new package/license for Office for Mac. Same goes for Photoshop and other utilities like text editors or FTP clients. Some Mac-only apps can export files that work on PC, but won't run on PC'slike iPhoto, for instance.

File Sync and System Files: Thumbs.db and .DS_Store

Printer and Fax Sharing

To go in the other direction, simply share your Windows printer as usual and use the Mac's printer browser to find it.

Running Windows on your Mactel

• Dual boot Windows on your Mac using Boot Campforces you to partition your hard drive into two sections and choose which OS to start when you turn on your computer, but runs Windows natively (read:fast)
  
• Run Windows inside OS X with not-free virtualization software like Parallels or VMwarelets you move files back and forth between each OS's drives and open any file on either system using a Mac or Windows app. (You can even set a Mac or Windows app to open for a filetype by default from either system.)
  
• Virtualize your Boot Camp partition to get the best of both worldsmake your choice every time whether you want to start Windows natively or within OS X, based on the task at hand

A few things to keep in mind when you set up Windows on your Mac: If you choose Boot Camp, you'll have a choice to format your Windows partition as FAT (which has a 32GB size limit for Boot Camp) or NTFS. NTFS is more secure and has no size limit, but OS X cannot write to NTFS drives, only read them. That means that you cannot save files to your Windows partition while you're booted up into OS X, just like you can't write to your Mac drive in Windows. (If you do opt for FAT, you can write to your Boot Camp Windows partition in OS X.)

If you go the virtualization route, when Windows is running inside OS X, you can easily copy files between your Mac and Windows drives. In fact, Parallels mounts your Windows hard drive and displays it in Finder like any writable external drive (pictured.)

Remote Server Access

Most commercial remote login services like LogMeIn are Windows-only, but the cross-platform VNC lets you remote control your Mac or PC from either OS. Likewise, the free VPN software and network which lets you stream your iTunes library over the internet and access shared drives, Hamachi, is also available for Mac with HamachiX.

Instant Messenger, Email and Outlook/Entourage

There's no Microsoft Outlook for Mac, but Entourage (included in Office for Mac) can talk to your Microsoft Exchange server. Mac's Mail.app is also not available for PC but supports your standard email fetching and sending protocols, like POP/IMAP and SMTP, so it can download and send mail from Gmail or your ISP just the way Outlook Express can on your PC. Update: Mail.app can also work with Exchange server. Thanks, Byslexic!

iTunes, your iPod, and Other Incompatibilities

You can, of course, share a library on a Mac or PC and listen to it in iTunes on any other machine regardless of OS.

Likewise, you've got to choose between formatting your iPod for Mac or Windows. An iPod formatted for one will not work with the other. Update: Two readers report that a Windows-formatted iPod WILL work on a Mac, but not the other way around.

Along those same lines, an external hard drive formatted "Mac OS Extended" can't be plugged into Windows and just work. However, USB drives formatted "MS-DOS" (for Windows, that is) can be recognized, read and written to by both Windows and Mac OS. So a thumb drive sneaker net will work between Mac and PC.

Making the Switch

How do you negotiate Windows and Mac OS in your computing life? Let us know in the comments.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, has one foot in each OS on a daily basis. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.