WinAmp 3. I've seen some people bitching about new WinAmp 3 but I like it. Free-form skins are awesome. Check out Timepiece skin. I'll probably settle for something clean and functional in the end but it's so much fun checking out all those crazy, beautifully designed skins. WinAmp might not look like much but in my opinion it teaches a few important lesson in software developement and marketing.

WinAmp is a platform. WinAmp isn't just a music (and now video) player, it's a platform. All the user-contributed skins, visualization components help WinAmp fend off competition, even from those who can include competing player in the OS itself.

WinAmp is not only useful, it's also desireable. When designing stuff, including software, the first step is to design something that is useful and functional. But when your competition's stuff is as functional as yours, you have to do better, you have to compete in desirability. Apple is a good example: their iPod doesn't play mp3 better than other players but it does look cool and that allows Apple charge for it more. WinAmp also does a lot of things that don't contribute much to functionality but a lot to desirability: tasteful splash screen with a reference to a recent boxoffice hit, visualizations, skins, animated "about box".

WinAmp is masterfully marketed. Take a careful look at WinAmp website. It has it's own, distinctive voice. You won't find there cliched market speak ("our product is leading blah, blah..."). Web site is well designed (it's both tasteful and functional). It has forums so that people can talk about their products. It has plenty of documentation. While this exact style might not be appropriate for every software company, many could learn a lot from guys at WinAmp.

Watch and learn.     

Interesting tool: http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/rpmsize/. It'll show which RPM packages take most of the space on your hard-drive. You can use this information to delete those that take a lot of space (and you have no need for).     

Browsing referers log for my blog has been recently a source of a few surprises in the form of cool web sites. The latest one is Organica. They crawl blogs and do stats e.g. about links between blogs. There's a similar thing on BlogDex. A great way to find out who reads and links to your blog.     

For some reason I had low opinion of external bookmark managers (without trying them) even though my bookmarks are out of control. I became an instant convert after trying Powermarks for mere 30 minutes. It almost removes the frustration of not being able to find a page bookmarked some time ago.