Here are my five favorite albums from the 2000’s:

1. Rooney – Rooney. Just a great album from start to finish. “You’ll be out milking cows before you cash the check… these are the words the popstars, these are the words of the unsophisticated money machines, for the killers of rock and roll…”
2. Phantom Planet – The Guest. Same as with Rooney. The OC kind of tainted California; Lonely Day and Anthem and others more than make up for any taint.
3. Taylor Swift – Taylor Swift. It is just that good. She is the biggest thing to happen to country music since Garth Brooks. And she deserves it — she is incredibly talented, and more as a song writer than a performer.
4. X&Y – Coldplay. I liked Coldplay. Then they released Viva la Vida, which was OK, but not great. Then UPop (the Pop heard around the world) on XM decided to play nothing but Coldplay for a month. It was an improvement over the occasional French songs that came on, but the end result totally turned me off Coldplay (that and Gweneth “Europe is better than America” Paltrow). Nevertheless, I cannot deny that every song on this album is catchy and good.
5. The Killers – Personal Compilation. I love the Killers with a caveat. But the albums are a hodgepodge of really great and really ok songs. Each of their albums have two or three gems, and two or three always fast forward. One thing about the Killers that I love is that many of the songs start off kind of bland, but have hooks buried minutes into the songs that are pure genius. Try:
   • Mr. Brightside
   • All These Things I Have Done
   • Glamorous Indie Rock & Rolls
   • Ballad of Bobby Valentine
   • Bling (Confessions of a King)
   • Read My Mind
   • Why Do I Keep Counting?
   • A Dustland Fairy Tale
   • Human

My five favorites from the 90’s:

1. OK Computer – Radiohead. Probably my favorite album of all-time. Except for Fitter, Happier.
2. The Bends – Radiohead. This album is what started me on my Radiohead oddessy.
3. Weezer – The Blue Album. I listened to this endlessly while playing the original Doom from start to finish.
4. U2 – Actung Baby. Freshman year of college.
5. Tom Petty – Greatest Hits. I know it is a little bit of a kopout to cite a Greatest Hits album. Nevertheless… Does anybody remember the Free Fallin’ video that was always on MTV and VH1 in the late 80’s?

Staci uses Blogger. I use Wordpress. I figured that blog publishing services would be a sort of one-size-fits-all proposition. Turns out, not so much.

Below are the services I found:

1.  Blurb is supposedly the gold standard for converting blogs to books. When I visited the site, however, the "slurping" algorithms are broken for Blogger and Wordpress.  It still works for other blog platforms, such as TypePad and LiveJournal. To create a book, you have to install their BookSmart client to install on your computer. Because I run Wordpress blogs, however, I was unable to see functionality and comment on layouts, etc.

This site is good for most run-of-the-mill bloggers who are not computer geniuses, the lack of Blogger/Wordpress functionality is problematic because most run-of-the-mill bloggers use either Blogger or Wordpress. They say this will eventually be fixed. It better be if they want to stay in business.

2.  A good option for Blogger, however, is SharedBook . All you have to do is put your blog address into the form on the main SharedBook webpage, tell it whether you want the whole blog or a certain time period. It then creates a book for you and tells you how much dough you need to cough up to get the book. Three limitations I saw are (1) it will not print a book with an excess of 350 pictures 500 pictures, which means that picture blogs will need to be broken up into smaller periods of time;  (2) it forces comments to be printed; (3) there are no options for formatting to make the book really snazzy like the other sites. That said, the default layout was great and I appreciated the simplicity of the site. You literally will have your book ready to preview and order in two minutes.

SharedBook didn’t work for my Wordpress blogs.

Update

Carolyn from SharedBook weighed in. Because I don’t really solicit comments on this blog, which means readers are unlikely to see her comment, I copy her comment below.

Hi. Just wanted you to know that SharedBook has lifted the 350 picture max and expanded to 500 the number of photos that can automatically be loaded. Also, you can remove all or some portion of the comments by personalizing your Blog2Print book (you can also add more photos).

It looks like that in addition to super ease of use of SharedBook and great default layout, you are also likely to have a hands on experience with the operators if any issues need to be resolved. Sometimes that alone is worth using a service.

3. Lulu . This is for real die-hards. It really isn’t a blog book printing site, but has an amazing array of utilities for printing books from cookbooks, to comic books, to wedding books, to text books. If you want to sell your content, this is place to do it, but creation of a book here will take some elbow grease because there is no automated feature for blogs. I.e., there will be a lot of copying, pasting, and uploading. Pictures are uploaded using their slick Lulu Studio that is able to import from Flickr or Photobucket. Lulu is an ideal site for aspiring professional photographers to make proof books or demo books.