Pointers for Podcasting

Podcasting is the sharing of audio or video files. For example, radio programs or music videos broadcasting over the Internet using specific web feed formats such as RSS or Atom syndication. This has become one of the new hottest trends to hit the Internet right now. Its popularity is growing along with the hype.

To create audio content should be very easy, considering it can be anything you like at all. Music, audio books, or radio shows. There is no set method on how to compose audio content. Whatever the individual likes is what these shows should be in reference to. Depending on if you have a Mac or a PC, you will want to consider using Garage Band for the Mac user, or if you are a PC user, you will want to use Audacity. Both are excellent choices since they are powerful and seem to be very popular. The best part about both these programs is that there are both free.

When finished with your audio show you will want to save it at the highest quality in the original format of audio application. That way if you need to go back and do some editing, there will already be a good version saved. Once audio subject matter is finished, it should be saved in MP3 format. This is to all intents and purposes the standard format for podcasts. MP3 format seems to be the best format to stick with. It seems to be very universal and user friendly. Plus, if you go to any other format some users may not be able to use your podcast. And you want to make it available to as many people as possible.

Some suggested settings to use that offer superior outcomes that have minimum bit rate are as follows:

48 to 56k Mono, sermons, audio books, talk radio

64k plus stereo, music, music and talk combinations

128k stereo, good quality music

.mp3 file extension is how all these files should be saved.

In order to publish an MP3 file, you will need to save it to your web browser. It can then be tested on any MP3 player. It is easy to manage and find your files that you may want to put them all into a directory. These file can go anywhere on the site, but for convenience keeping them in the same directory seems to be the best in the long run.

Podcast feeds are RSS files that explain your podcast. They also contain information for each show. An RSS file is a text file that associates to MP3 files. Any text editor can be used to generate RSS news feed. Blogging programs really seem to be very popular right now with most podcasters. This automatically generates news feeds.

If you are have a blogging tool that lets you position enclosures, produce an item for each MP3 file that is available and use the URL of an audio content as an enclosure. If blogging tool does not maintain enclosures, do not worry. With the growing recognition of podcasts, there for sure soon will be one day.

For the time being, all of your editing of your RSS file can be done with any type of text editor to insert the enclosure tag. And you always want to make sure to save RSS file with the .rss or .xml extension. Generally, you will be looking for a news feed that holds all of your podcasts in the order from the newest to the oldest.

To publish your podcast news feed you will need to pass on your RSS file to your web server. Validate it using the RSS validator. If it is valid, it is ready to be published on the Internet. The last things you will really need to do are checking your podcast and publish it. There are several great podcasting logos out there so you will want to make sure you can find yours easily enough. With all of this said and done do not forget to ad your website to your podcast directory.

With the growing popularity of podcasting it seems to be catching on everywhere. It is becoming more common. No matter what it is for whether it is audio books, sermons or for educational purposes. Whatever the reason may be it seems to be one of the easiest forms of distributing information over the Internet so far.

The glaslight industry

Mechanical inefficiency cannot be blamed an the region’s age or geographi¬cal deficiencies; it is the result of administrative decisions. Two generations ago, Samuel Insull, the man who did for electricity what Henry Ford did for the automobile, showed the power industry that it was much more efficient to use large generating plants serving as many people as possible. No one believed him at first, and it might appear that many private company executives in New England still don’t. On average, the public utilities companies of the country serve three times as many people as do the companies of New England, and there are more than one and a half times as many people for every generating plant. This means for New England more executives, more plants and lines to maintain, more secretaries, more maintenance workers, more pensions and insurance, and higher labor costs per customer. New Englanders are paying to perpetuate a quaint private industry organization that is not nearly as charming as a covered bridge and much more expensive.
Attempts at consolidation have been made, but the pace is slow. In some places in New England, covered bridges have rotted away before the public realized what was happening. It is unlikely, however, that any private utility in the region will collapse, for they are protected by the state regulatory agencies and an apathetic public. Almost all of the region’s utilities make the maximum profit allowed by law, and a few are considerably above the prescribed limit. Blackstone Valley Electric Co. of Rhode Island earned in 1965 a return Of 9.34 per cent, almost twice the limit.
Only Vermont’s Public Service Board seems to take seriously its Obligation to set reasonable rates. New Hampshire and Connecticut appear indifferent at best, and the regulatory agencies in Maine, Massachusetts and The Maine and Massachusetts agencies have been hostile, almost insulting, to recent appearances by public-power groups.
Part of this situation results from the fact that none of the agencies has money or staff to do an adequate job. Most are so short of skilled help that they are forced to accept company operating statistics as a basis for deter¬mining rates. Unless the public demands it, the regulatory agencies are not likely to hire qualified accountants or engineers, and the prevailing public attitude is that the cost of electricity has formed a triumvirate with death and taxes. The result is that the regulatory agencies are permitting monopo¬lies to earn good profits with equipment and organizational structures that would drive them to the wall if they were faced with even moderately ag¬gressive competition. Allowing each utility exclusive control of its sales ter¬ritory prevents wasteful duplication of plants and lines, but it also creates an attitude of status quo complacency. Creative regulatory policies could im¬pose penalties for continued use of outmoded steam plants, instead of allow¬ing them to be included in the rate base.
However, conventional steam plants have had their day in New England. After 1969, the region’s power industry will most likely build only power-cost nuclear plants. It already has an experimental nuclear plant, Yankee, at Rowe, Mass., and five others are either under construction or committed. These five are part of what the private companies have dubbed their “Big 11 Power Loop”; the other six installations consist of five conventional steam plants and a pumped storage plant. All eleven are scheduled to be finished by the end of 19′72 and will be connected by 9oo miles of 345-kilovolt transmission lines. The cost of the project is about S9oo million, and the plants will provide about 6.3 million kilowatts of power.
The narre “Big 11 Power Loop”-but not the plants or transmission lines -is a gimmick, pure and simple. No engineering plan or study supports the location, type or design of the plants an a system-wide basis. It all started with
a Full-page newspaper advertisement announcing the “Loop” and implying that the whole thing was thought out well in advance. The campaign, carried an with television commercials costing about S200,ooo a year, was devised by the private companies’ trade organization, the Electric Coordinating Council of New En¬gland (ECCNE), in response to the threat of the federal government’s Dickey¬Lincoln School hydroelectric project. . . .
The darr at Dickey is the practical reality left over from the dream of harnessing the tides in Passamaquoddy Bay at the eastern tip of Maine. . . . By 198o it will provide only i per cent of the area’s electrical requirements. But it will probably bring with it a Northeast Power Commission to market the power. It is expected that the cheaper power of Dickey, combined with the Thereupon, the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners contracted for low-sulfur oil to burn in the city’s generators. The only oil then available came from the Mideast, so the commissioners took that. industrycurrent The Arab oil embargo in October knocked out 48 per cent of the city’s fuel supply overnight, and its only firm source of electricity was the federal Bonneville Dam Project along the Columbia River, which sent power south via the Pacific Intertie to supply io per cent of the city’s needs. But Jong periods of drought in the Northwest had been followed by an early and massive cold wave. Streams that fed the Columbia froze, drastically reducing the runoff that supplied the Bonne¬ville reservoirs. business current Coming at a time when its customers in the Northwest were drawing heavily an Bonneville for additional heat, the reduction in power forced it to cut all service to the Southland.

Capitalising on the Web 2.0 Revolution

If you’ve been amazed at the rapid rise of internet communities such MySpace, YouTube and Squidoo then it’s likely that you’re aware of the new trend in using the internet as a platform to meet friends and build business contacts.

The term that has been coined to capture the development of social interactivity across the internet is called ‘web 2.0′, and web 2.0 portals are springing up across the planet faster than you can or I can type.

Now web 2.0 is a fundamental shift in the way that people are using the internet, and it won’t ever replace the old ‘web 1.0′ sites. That is, ’static’ websites that offer useful content but are not being updated.

However since web 2.0 sites are continually updating themselves with topical information, the Search Engines Google, Yahoo and MSN are picking up these sites as avenues of more current information.

Some examples of web 2.0 portals include Blogs (Blogger.com), Mash-ups (Google Maps), Social Networks (LinkedIn.com), Tagging (Del.icio.us) and Wiki (Wikipedia.com).

Web 2.0 communities represent a spirit of free and open communication, and are also referred to as social media technologies.

The biggest factor about web 2.0 technology is the way it is being used as social proof. For instance, visit a Blog and you can leave comments about the topic that is presented or discussed.

Alternatively, visit a community site and start to form your own social network where you can add friends to your social group, be involved in group discussions, and provide comment on topics that you know. Forums are a recognised social presence on the internet and are a common web 2.0 technology.

If you run a niche website, you don’t need to run an entire community forum to benefit from the Search Engine traffic. Web 2.0 niche portals can transform your static ‘web 1.0′ website into the new world order of web 2.0 technology.

For instance, using web 2.0 niche portals you can invite your visitors to leave comments or add a link to their website via your web 2.0 portal.

Alternatively, people can view a video wall related to your niche themed site, and may be attracted to click on the Adsense advertising around the articles around your site.

Finally, if they can’t find what they are looking for on your site, a Google Search box can assist them to look for more relevant information directly from your site.

While web 1.0 websites are being left in the dust by the Search Engines, with web 2.0 niche portals you can easily upgrade your website and start capitalising on the web 2.0 revolution.

Understanding Streaming Video

There are two ways to view media such as video or audio on the internet and that is downloading and streaming video.

Downloading

When you download a file the entire file is saved on your computer’s hard drive, which you then open and view at your leisure. The one major advantages is having quicker access to different parts of the file once downloaded, but it has the big disadvantage of you having to wait for the whole file to completely download before any of it can be viewed. If the file is quite small this may not be too much of a problem for you, but for large files it can tax your patience.

The easiest way to provide downloadable video files is to use a simple hyperlink to the file on your site or server. A slightly more advanced method is to embed the file in a web page on your site using special HTML code.

Making video files available this way is known as HTTP streaming or HTTP delivery. HTTP means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, and is the same protocol used to deliver web pages. For this reason it is easy to set up and use on almost any website, without requiring additional software or special hosting plans.

Streaming

Streaming video works a bit differently, you or your visitors, the end users can start watching the file almost as soon as it begins downloading. The file is sent to the user in a constant stream, ideally, and the user watches it as it arrives. The main advantage with this method is that no waiting is involved, depending on the download speed of your service. Streaming media has additional advantages such as being able to broadcast live events, sometimes referred to as a webcast or netcast.

True streaming video must be delivered from a specialized streaming server.

Progressive Downloading

There is also a hybrid method known as progressive download. In this method the video file is downloaded but begins playing as soon as a portion of the file has been received. This simulates true streaming, but doesn’t have all the advantages.

HTTP Streaming Video

This is the simplest and cheapest way to stream video from a website. Small to medium sized websites are more likely to use this method than the more expensive streaming servers.

For this method you don’t need any special type of website or host, just a host server which recognises common video file types (most standard hosting accounts do this). Bear in mind you can’t stream live video, since the HTTP method only works with complete files stored on the server. This method is very popular and will be used on this site and video syndication sites such as YouTube.

Create a Streaming Video File

There are many streaming video formats and the main one are probably familiar to you already. The most popular are Macromedia Flash, RealMedia, Windows Media, Quicktime and MPEG.

Each format has its pro and cons and people have their own preference. Ideally you should have files in all formats but this is far from practical and it is best to choose one or two at the most. Flash is the format recommended on this site and the Flash Player is usually found on the majority of computers connected to the internet.

There are two ways to create stored streaming video files

Once you have created you video in, let’s say, .avi format then you need to prepare it for uploading to your web site ready for streaming by one of the following methods.

1. Use a conversion utility program. This takes an existing digital video file (avi) and converts it into the streaming format of your choice, in this case Flash video.
2. Export streaming files from video editing software such as Adobe Premiere or Ulead Video Studio.

Conversion Utilities

A conversion utility is a stand alone program which imports a video clip and exports it in a different format. Examples include RealNetworks Real Producer External Link and Sorenson Squeeze External Link. There are simpler, cheaper and even free software programs for converting videos into Flash format which are perfectly adequate for the scope of this web site.

Basically, you simply open a file and select which which format to save it as. You can set various parameters to optimise the final video. The program will then chug away for some time while it makes the conversion.

Making Money On the Internet With Video Marketing

It may seem daunting to most people, but like it or not, video is becoming a huge part of the internet. Nowadays, if you’re not making money on the internet, it may be because you’re not using videos as one of your main marketing tools.

Technology is scary to a lot of people, not to mention, exposing oneself online in a video for the whole world to see. That’s why so many people shy away from learning what it takes to market a business using video – either they figure it’s too technical for them, or they want to maintain their privacy.

That’s precisely why you should think about making money from the internet with video. It’s the things that people don’t want to do that you should be jumping on as a new opportunity for you. In the internet business world, it’s where you find holes, and gaps, and things that people don’t want to do that you can start making real money online.

Video is becoming more and more like the written word, and will soon have the same tagging capacity as you find in articles and blogs that are carefully sprinkled with effective keywords.

In that sense, if you are looking to make money on the internet, you can expect the search engines to send heaps of traffic your way if you have keyword packed videos.

Videos are very effective in teaching people how to do things, and can probably establish more trust from someone thinking about buying one of your products or services if they can see and hear you.

Furthermore, just like sharing information via social networking sites from blogs and articles, and other information sites on the net, videos also have their social networking services that allow you to share your videos with others in your niche.

If you think you’re in the dark about technology and will never have a clue how to use it, or how to make money on the internet with video, then have no fear! Any good video creation or syndication service will offer easy-to-follow training for setting up your first, and subsequent videos.

Much like article writing, you’re not done with your videos after you’ve created them. You have to submit them to video syndication sites to spread them around the net.

If you’ve been involved in manually submitting your articles to the various article directories, you will realize how time-consuming and tedious this can be, and how much worse you can expect it to be for submitting a video file!

Luckily, just like article submission services, there are video submission services that can save you loads of time on your video uploads!

If you really don’t want to venture into the land of video marketing, you can always opt for an equally popular podcast, or audio cast, so that the whole world only hears you, but doesn’t have to see you. You can start making money on the internet just as fast with an effective podcast that you submit the same way as videos.

Just think about the results you could achieve by combining article writing with video marketing, and podcasting! Most people are familiar with YouTube, so if you visit their website, you will be able to setup an account, create your video, and start making money on the internet faster than you ever imagined!

Don’t be fooled by the all the technological jargon out there. If you know how to work a digital camera, have a movie feature on your camera, or have ever used a camcorder, then relax! You are most of the way there!

Making money on the internet can happen for you, and tackling your fears about technology and starting a video or podcast marketing campaign can make your dreams come true, especially now when it’s still relatively new!

An Introduction to TV Tuners

TV tuners are the part of computer that receives the television signals and enables you to view the TV on your computer. These tuners also allow you to record your favourite programs on you hard disk for viewing at the later stage. These TV tuner cards are quite easy to afford when compared to other options available in the market. A good enough TV tuner is available in less than £25.

Based on the TV signal type there are basically two types of TV tuner cards. One is Analogue TV tuner and other one is Digital TV tuner. Analogues tuners are what used to be used in most countries and is good when you are watching TV real time. But the use of analogue tuners is on the decline as various countries are turning towards digital signals and phasing out analogue signals.

Digital TV tuners are what is currently popular and these display digital signals on our computers also known as HD TV signals. These signals are very easy to record and read on later times because of the digital format. In addition to there are another two types which are mixture of both analogue and digital tuners. One is called combination tuners and have both analogue and digital tuners fitted into one tuner card. With this tuner you can record on one tuner while you can also watch on other tuner at the same time. Another type Hybrid tuners is similar to analogue tuners but the difference lies in the fact that at a given time only one tuner out of two in-built tuners can be in the working state.

Other than this TV tuners are also classified on other criteria i.e. either they can be external tuners or internal tuners. You can either one of them by deciding on various criteria like whether you are buying them for laptop or desktop. You can watch TV on any number of computer devices via a USB connection, PCI card, PCMCIA card, Express Card, or a few other interfaces. If you are a mobile phone buff then some of these tuners come with tuner attachments especially target for mobile phones. In addition to this some of the video cards also double up as TV tuners.

These days before buying TV tuner you should be sure about this thing that you are buying a tuner which can process and display digital signals as the various governments are phasing out analogue TV so you should be on concrete place before your analogue tuner becomes useless.

Flex application development

Flex is a free, open source framework for building highly interactive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. Flex creates SWF files that are rendered by Flash Player. Flex applications are delivered on the web via the Flash Player or to the desktop via Adobe AIR.

Apart from this, web development services are quite commonly known in the world of Internet. It is actually the development of various web applications to form a website and includes all the components that are required to precede with the task, like web designing, and e-commerce, content development of a website, web server configuration and server-side/client-side coding.

Flex application development is a newly introduced term and may not be known by many. It basically relates to Adobe flex, which is the cross-platform, that is based on the Macromedia flash software, which is a development framework and a comprehensive application advancement tool. It is also a solution for the development and delivery of RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) within the enterprise and also throughout the web to enhance the interactivity for the Internet.

Benefits of using Flex on your website.Here are some reasons for deciding to put a Flex application on your website:

* To have a very robust application that attractively visualizes complex data sets
* To engage your users or visitors and let them feel empowered
* Flex is the technology of the future – it shows your organization is modern
* It works on all major platforms and users don’t need to install anything
* Audio and video can be integrated, allowing even greater interaction
* Data synchronization allows real-time data push from back-end to application

Developing a Flex application

About Feasting On Cookies

A “cookie” obtains information sent by a web server to be stored on a web browser so that it can later be read back from that browser. This becomes useful for having the browser remember specific information about a visitor to a particular website. The cookie is a text file that is saved in the browser’s directory and is stored in RAM while the browser is running. The cookie may also be stored on the computer’s hard drive once a user logs off from that website or web server.

Cookies can tell a web server if you have been there before and can pass short bits of information (such as a user number) from the web server back to itself the next time you visit. Most cookies last only until you exit your browser and then are destroyed. A second type of cookie known as a persistent cookie has an expiration date and is stored on your disk until that date. A persistent cookie can be used to track a user’s browsing habits by identifying him whenever he returns to your web site.

Persistent cookies are stored in different places on your system depending on which web browser and browser version you are using. Netscape stores all its persistent cookies in a single file named cookies.txt on your computer. You can open and edit this file with a text editor and delete any cookies that you don’t want to keep or delete the file itself to get rid of all of your cookies. Internet Explorer stores persistent cookies in separate files named with the user’s name and the domain name of the site that sent the cookie.

One use of cookies is for storing passwords and user ID’s for specific websites. On sites with personalized viewing, your web browser will be requested to utilize a small amount of space on your computer’s hard drive to store these preferences. That way, each time you log on to that website, your browser will check to see if you have any pre-defined preferences (a cookie) for that unique server. If you do, the browser will send the cookie to the server along with your request for a web page. Common uses for which companies utilize cookies include: on-line ordering systems, site personalization, and website tracking.

Cookies have some beneficial things. Site personalization is one of the most beneficial uses for cookies. You must have also seen in some websites that when you log in (using a User ID & Password), there is an option for ‘remember me when I visit next time’; that’s possible because it stored your password and id on your machine in a cookie.