Whether you make a living from buying and selling on eBay or you merely sell off your basement junk when it gets too crowded down there, iSale is a fantastic eBay client that merges the wonders of Mac OS X with the world's leading online marketplace. Offering beautiful tempaltes, WYSIWYG auction composing, integration with iCal, Address Book and iSight, a Dashboard widget for monitoring auctions, Google Maps and worlds more, iSale has everything you need to get your eBay on.

Like so many other web-integrated Mac OS X apps, however, iSale was hit with compatibility issues if users installed the Safari 3 beta. Fortunately, a couple of recent updates have fixed those issues and added over 30 new templates to bring the grand total to more than 200 different auction templates, organized by category. With a wide variety of template styles, imagery and layouts, you'll be hard pressed to not find something that'll fit just about anything you post for auction.

This most recent v4.2 of iSale is a free upgrade for registered 4.x users, and a demo is available. A single user license costs $39.95, while family packs start at $49.95 and go up from there.

Have you ever considered selling your own music on iTunes? A service called TuneCore makes that possible. You pay a small charge to deliver your album to iTunes plus a yearly fee. If people start buying your tunes, you earn $0.70 per track.

So let's say you create an album with 8 tracks. You pay $0.99 per track upload plus another $0.99 for the album listing, and $9.98 for the first year album fee. That works out to--scratches head--8 x $0.99 + 1 x $0.99 + $9.98 = $18.89 to upload and store that 8-track album. After the first year, you continue to pay $9.98 per year per album. That album would start earning money for you after the first 26-or-so sales, if I did the math right which is always questionable.

So what does selling through iTunes get you? First of all, nearly anyone who doesn't use Linux can use iTunes to buy your tracks, so your product is pretty accessible. Second, I'm guessing that TuneCore takes care of a lot of the accounting issues, so you just upload and you're done until you start earning money--if you start earning money.

Obviously, you'd have to take care of your own marketing, but this would make a great way to distribute material for non-profits like schools for audio-only material. This of course, assumes, that TuneCore ends up being reliable and trustworthy. TuneCore offers a complete FAQ of their service here.

John Gruber has penned an interesting observation of how Microsoft might very well have missed the mark from the get-go when they made the strange decision to take on the iPod and iTunes. Since the player's initial wiz-bang sales period is essentially over (as in: it more or less set a decent sales barometer, at least for now), John wrangles some interesting statistics from Amazon's charts on exactly where the Zune stands in comparison to Apple's players (including year-old models), as well as its ranking in the overall electronics category. To spoil the surprise: the Zune isn't doing so well. We've looked at Amazon's charts before, but as of this writing, a record player is beating out the best selling Zune on the electronics list, while iPods - specifically the small, flash-based nano and shuffle - dominate most of the top 10 spots.

John then uses this data and good ol' fashioned people watching to conclude that Microsoft shouldn't have taken what could be their only swing at the plate in producing a hard drive-based iPod; they should have cranked out a flash memory model to go head-on with the nano - inarguably the home run slugger in Apple's lineup. While I tend to agree with John, I also see a problem with going down this road: Microsoft would likely have had even less room to maneuver, and even fewer things to market ('Beam your tunes') and invent lame, dead-end lingo for - they actually refer to sharing your music wirelessly as 'squirting'. Who wants to bet how excited Steve Ballmer's kids are to 'squirt' at school?

Sure, when you look at what you're up against in the DAP market, Apple's iPod nano and SanDisk's respectable 2GB Sansa player (expandable via an SD slot, and at #11 on Amazon as of this writing) are the top dogs to beat - but what could they have offered? I highly doubt they could have fit their DRM-crippled and arguably worthless (though admittedly buzz-worthy) Wi-Fi sharing feature into a nano-sized player, even if they made it slightly larger and uglier like the Zune is to its 30GB iPod rival. A 'Zune nano' with nothing unique to offer would dry up on its own in a market already dominated by Apple, SanDisk and Creative, and Microsoft's exclusive, 3rd party bitch-slap of a music store would have even less of a leg to stand on.

In summary: I think John's right - Microsoft made a bad move in copying the 30GB hard drive-based iPod, but it was the only move they had. In this light, it kinda makes you wonder why they bothered in the first place.