There are only a few places around the world where the vice of art of consumerism is having a good day. Suffice it to say that the holiday season will be celebrated; it just won’t be full of so much…stuff. And maybe a bit less happiness to show for it, too.

So Scrooge wins this time around. But here’s a glimmer of hope to nibble on. In the media world, in an industry dominated by the RIAA and the MPAA, diminished sales matched with increased P2P “naughtiness” may tip the scales in favor of the change that people have long been hoping for in the land of “fair use” and fair pricing.

It’s Worth a Shot

Of course, the cards remain stacked against what everyone fond of music and movies familiar with copyright law and media titans’ business practices believe in. You can teach an old dog new tricks, but it sure as heck ain’t easy, as the last few years of relative chaos has made clear. It’s hardly guaranteed that we’ll see greener pastures anytime soon.

But, and this is a pretty big but, there’s a possibility that what goes on on the Web between the present day and whenever the moment is that this global “economic downturn” goes in the direction most of us wish to go will cause the Sonys and Universals and Warners and EMIs of the world to shift course. In three ways, this means:

Taking DRM entirely out of the picture, which continues to be an annoyingly persistent reality, despite its philosophical and practical absurdity for associated software and hardware markets (i.e., iPod/iTunes vs. Zune vs Sandisk, et al.);

Allowing for streaming services like Last.fm and MySpace Music to actually host on-demand playback options for full tracks from full albums and EPs with no limits;

And attaching costs to purchased copies of singles, albums, and movies that more accurately reflect production and modern distribution costs. Simply put, having to pay upwards of $10 for a 10- to 12-track album or $12-15 for a film that involves little or no petroleum in the effort to get it from the seller to the listener is ridiculous and dishonest.

All About Bang for Buck

Let’s face it, the path for a continued physical presence in consumers’ lives is a finite one. CDs and DVDs sell, but that won’t forever be the case. And in light of that expectation, the media industry would be off to quite an improved position in these murky times if it 1) enticed consumers with a largely irresistible cost structure for retail downloads, and 2) made it easier for consumers to actually play their preordained part.

It’s pretty logical, I think. If you as a producer would like people to consume more of your content, make your content available in ways and at prices that don’t scream “here’s the premium to pay to watch this on your television set or hear that on your portable player this very minute if you prefer not to gas it over to Wal-Mart or wait for super-slow Super-Saver shipping by Amazon for the tangible thing.”

Yes, the convenience of near-instant gratification is a definite plus. But with infrastructural savings on the part of producers and distributors should come a substantial financial benefit for the consumer as well.

Imagery provided by iStockPhoto/DNY59; HappyBirthdayBilly

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Source:Mashable!

Despite increased knowledge and awareness about Internet security, we still can’t be too careful while surfing the Web these days. There are still less than scrupulous people out there hoping to trip us up. That’s why we need to ensure that we setup protective methods that are automatic and require as little manual interaction as possible.

Many of us fully understand the importance of running antivirus and anti-spyware programs and hopefully all perform updates and patching for our operating systems. However, while we take the necessary measures to protect ourselves from frontdoor attacks (viruses) as well as backdoor attacks (spyware), most of us do not safeguard our systems from sidedoor attacks (application patching).

Application Patching

The problem with patching and updating tools for any operating system is that they do not (and cannot) check third party applications. Microsoft and Apple can only patch and update their own OS and applications, which leaves a great deal of applications vulnerable and exposed. This in turn renders your system vulnerable and exposed as well.

While there are some apps that are good at self-updating and patching themselves, such as Adobe with its popular Adobe Reader and Flash Player, most applications simply don’t patch themselves automatically. In most cases, this is a tedious manual process. You can go to each and every application’s website to check for any security patches or updates, download them and apply them, but who has time for that? That explains why this security hole has become a favorite target for malicious types.

Windows Application Protection

Thankfully, there’s an excellent solution available from Secunia. They provide the ability to scan and update over 7,000 applications and utilities. The good news is that you can perform these scans for free online via their OSI (Online Software Inspector), which can help you patch over 70 applications including popular apps such as Winzip, Adobe Reader, Yahoo messenger, Firefox, etc. Once a scan has been performed, you will see the status of each application with download links to any patch updates that are available for applications that are vulnerable.

They also provide (PSI) Personal Software Inspector, a downloadable program that you install on your system. It’s also free for home use and scans over 7,000 applications. If you want to protect your desktop at work then you’ll need to purchase a license for their NSI (Network Software Inspector). In most cases, you’ll need to let your Information Technology department handle that one.

Mac OS Application Protection

CNET’s VersionTracker for the Mac OS tracks application updates and provides daily updates for easy identification of the apps you need to patch or upgrade. There’s a free online version which requires manual patching of your apps.

There’s also VersionTracker Pro, which automates the entire process much like Secunia does for Windows applications. There’s a version for both Mac OS and Windows should you need to protect both platforms from one place.

iPhone Application Protection

Believe it or not, you should take the same protection measures for all those tiny iPhone apps you’ve been installing. Just because they’re small and there haven’t been any widespread malware attacks on any particular iPhone apps yet doesn’t mean there won’t be. It’s a good idea to get in the habit of keeping whatever apps you have installed updated.

There aren’t any ways to automate this process yet so all you can do is keep an eye on the App Store icon on your iPhone home page and watch for the notifications of application updates. Once you see the notification simply go to each app and install the newer version which will replace the outdated version. The number 25 in the red circle means there are 25 updates waiting.

Conclusion

We must make the extra effort to setup our lines of defenses and include application patch management as part of our protection procedures. This will allow you to enjoy your experience online more because of greater peace of mind. Your return on investment (time) will be well worth it.

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, dra_schwartz

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Source:Mashable!

Here it is….Obama’s first YouTube video for his Weekly Address. What do you think?

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Barack Obama is already being called the YouTube President because of the 1,800 YouTube videos that help propel him to win the election and have been watched more than 110 million times. So it seems fitting that Obama will continue to use YouTube to get his message out once he takes office. The weekly radio address that every president has done since FDR will be videotaped and put onto YouTube.

These “fireside chats” were started by FDR during the depression as a way to reassure Americans that everything was going to be all right. Now Obama will have some of his own reassuring to do as we grapple with the current economic crisis.

This week has seen an incredible amount of interest around Twitterank, a new tool that popped up that computes a numerical score of … something.

At first, no one was really too sure what Twitterank was computing, but, it related to Twitter, one’s perceived popularity, and had a quirky site, so, why not enter in your credentials and see what the site had to say about you seemed to be the thinking.

Alas, as word of Twitterank spread (through automatic tweets of people’s scores), concerns arose that the site might be stealing user passwords, as Twitter users began seeing Tweets pop up in their timeline that they thought they didn’t make themselves. The phenomenon is perhaps best summarized by one of our commenters, Michael Bailey, who wrote:

“This whole password stealing rumor got started when a few people who did NOT bother to uncheck the box for sending their Twitterank to Twitter. Then it became a matter of self-preservation expressed in the form of “I did NOT give them permission to send that to Twitter” - well, yes they did because of the default setting, which they didn’t bother to read.

So, as most self-preservation of ones ego goes, many people began the rumors that the site must be stealing their passwords, even rumors of DM’s being sent from their account.”

In other words, the user flow on Twitterank – automatically tweeting one’s score unless the user explicitly opts out – was apparently enough to confuse a lot of people into thinking their accounts had been compromised. Additionally, you could (and still can) enter anything into the “password” box on Twitterank and have your score computed, although this won’t post your score to Twitter since it can’t be authenticated (although several commenters dispute this).

Twitterank’s developer, now known to be Ryo Chijiiwa (@ryochiji), has noted in his blog that he regrets these decisions, writing “I probably would’ve done 2 things differently. Firstly, I would’ve come up with an algorithm that works with Twitter’s Search API, which doesn’t require authentication. Secondly, I would’ve handled posting to twitter differently, which would’ve sacrificed virality, but after today, I’m not so sure insane rapid growth is really worth it.”

Indeed, the design of Twitterank certainly had much to do with its massive word-of-mouth spread, and it’s still Twitter’s #1 trending topic today. This design is also what led to speculation that it might be a phishing scam – a fire we added fuel to by simply asking our readers: “Is Twitterank Ranking Your Popularity or Stealing Your Password?”

The answer now appears to be the former, though the design flaws of Twitterank are certainly a valuable lesson for anyone building a Twitter application, or, on a more serious note, applications that actually do important stuff (as a recent victim of being opted into a credit card scam, I can relate). And for users, the Twitterank “scare” was an important reminder to keep your passwords safe, and use a diversity of them. After all, if something as innocuous as Twitterank was actually a phishing scam, it could easily be parlayed into accessing email, bank accounts, and other sensitive data.

As for Twitterank’s future, it’s self-deprecating developer probably describes it best: “by tomorrow, most of Twitterdom will have forgotten about Twitterank. Thank goodness for short attention spans.”

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Source:Mashable!

Some signs of how President-elect Barack Obama will use his massive Internet following are starting to surface. The President’s weekly radio address, a staple of American politics since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, will be posted to YouTube, starting this week with the Democratic address (the party not in power has also traditionally broadcast a weekly radio soundbite). The videos will also be posted to Change.gov, the President-elect’s transition site that launched last week.

According to The Washington Post, the Obama administration is also likely to launch a YouTube Channel for The White House after taking power. As a candidate, Obama (and rival John McCain) made heavy use of YouTube, utilizing the service for broadcasting speeches, campaign rallies, and political commercials. While placing the weekly radio addresses online in video will be a first, the current administration offers a full archive of all of President Bush’s weekly radio addresses as sound files at WhiteHouse.gov.

While this is certainly another sign that the Obama administration will continue to make social media and transparency an important piece of his Presidency, critics are quick to point out that he still has not updated his Twitter account since November 5th after winning the election. Presumably, we’ll continue to see new tools come out piecemeal as the transition team decides how to best utilize the Web.

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Here is the stark reality of online video: nobody is making much money and the enthusiastic projections for online video advertising going from $500 million in 2008 to more than $5 billion in five years will undoubtedly be pared back in the coming weeks as analysts revisit their numbers. (Those numbers are from August—eMarketer).

The writing is already on the wall. YouTube is resorting to selling off video search results to the sexiest bidder and just today announced that it is extending overlay ads in YouTube Partner videos to embedded videos on other sites (previously these would only show up on YouTube itself). It is pulling out all the stops to try to get those revenues flowing. Meanwhile, smaller video startups such as Veoh and Revsion3 have already cut back on staff and shows in order to survive.

There is plenty of video inventory, just not a lot that advertisers want. And even the videos produced and distributed online by the TV networks are bringing in only a fraction of the advertising dollars that they do on regular TV. NBC CEO Jeff Zucker’s fear that the Web will turn “analog dollars” into “digital pennies is coming true. According to Dean Denhart, the CEO of BlackArrow (a company that provides an ad-management system for on-demand video across both cable and the Web), mainstream video fetches an average of about 50-cents per thousand viewers per hour watched on broadcast and cable TV, compared to 5 cents per thousand viewers per hour watched for the same video on the Web.

Wizzard Media announced this Monday their third-quarter results, which continued along their impressive track record of sustained growth for this year. Wizzard, the publicly traded podcast network, is still not in the black but continues to bring in more revenue than most other networks could dream of doing.

The year to date reported revenues that exceeded last year’s by 29% at $4.6 million as of September 30th. The Q3 revenues alone sat at $1.5 million, only a 4% increase year over year, yet still impressive in what has been a generally unimpressive quarter so far for the general economy.

Growth is slowing slightly at Wizzard, but they continue to close the gap towards profitability, and it’s on track to at least match last year’s performance in terms of revenue.

As reports of the economic slow down finally hitting the online advertising sector have surfaced, it’s a good thing that Wizzard has appeared to have significantly cut their costs, with their net losses having outpaced revenue and dropped by 89% since last year.

Enough With the Numbers. What Does it Mean?

As I said last week when Revision3 announced their performance last week, 2009 will show us which business model is superior in terms of online multimedia content providers.

The two companies represent two competing forms of content monetization for today’s podcast only content. Revision3, like other niche outfits such as FunnyOrDie, is primarily a creative force, putting the bulk of their resources into show development, on-air talent and production value. Wizzard represents the other side of the industry, like YouTube and others, who act primarily as a hosting outfit and put their resources into developing unique and innovative ways to monetize the content created by those who aren’t directly employed by the company.

Neither model is particularly cheap, or clearly superior on the face of it, but running a network isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. The aggregation route has the potential to be the superior distance runner, since they’re in the business of developing and utilizing monetization technology for massive amounts of content, which after a point will go down in costs. Meanwhile, independent creative networks will continue to have significant production overhead, since on-air talent, when it’s successful, can only go up in cost.

Logic would then dictate that since content must continue to be created, yet won’t be most efficiently monetized by strictly in-house teams and technology, that the only way creative networks can succeed in the long term would be by either folding into or partnering with larger aggregation networks.

I think that as 2009 rolls in, we’ll see some of this start to happen with the recognizable names in this space. We’re starting to see some of this with the larger heritage studios and labels biting the bullet and partnering with YouTube. This trend will continue and possibly accelerate due to larger economic motivations.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Wizzard Media Joins the NavyWizzard Launches Branded Podcast PlayerWizzard Media Publicly Traded on AMEXWizzard Releases Video Using Adobe Media PlayerWizzard Media Joins Forces with TubeMogulWizzard Sees First Quarter Revenue Grow 130%Podcast: A Conversation with Wizzard’s Rob Walch

Forget those YouTubevertorials. Google is no longer joking around when it comes to turning YouTube into real business that, you know, makes money. YouTube on its own would rank as the second largest search engine after Google. And you know what? Google has already figured out how to make money from search. You sell the top results to the highest bidder.

YouTube has long resisted selling search results, but it has now caved in. Now anyone can promote their YouTube videos for specific search keywords on a pay-per-click basis. This should generate substantial new revenues for Google. YouTube has a lot of search inventory. (Viewers search on the site more than 2.5 billion times per month). This should also generate a lot more spam results.

An iPhone application called FrontPocket, built by Jacksonville, Florida-based design firm Updatable, launched today. It behaves as a mobile extension to 37signals’ Backpack service, a business organization and data sharing utility.

As any 37signals fan might intuit, a development of this type must be one thing above all: simple and straightforward. The better to conform to the less-is-more ethos maintained by the team behind Backpack and its siblingware. I think it’s safe to say FrontPocket can feel right at home with family.

A closer look at design

The design is almost entirely plain. Only the basic template of features evident in many other iPhone applications are there. Nothing more. As for color, I would say there’s only a half-rainbow thing happening, whereas on the desktop things are a little more festive. We all know how festive data management can be, eh?

Reasonable limitations

Looks aren’t very important here, however. It’s all about information access and seamless management between desktop and mobile environs, which FrontPocket handles fairly aptly. Of course, you can only do so much with the release. You can’t post files, for instance. (You’re using an iPhone, after all.) Lists, pages, calendars, and journal entries are the extent of what the application is capable of building, maneuvering or adding to or subtracting from. But that’s pretty much all you could sensibly ask of the app for the time being, right?

Whether you’re signed up for a payment plan with the browser-based service or maintain a free account, FrontPocket does its thing. Mostly. It is by no means a replacement, functionally speaking, or an equal to its inspiration. And there’s this thing about access you’ll need to be aware of, which is that you’ll have to fork over cash to 37signals each month - $7 or more - to make use of the calendaring service. Yet that is true whether you’re iPhone-enabled or not, so it’s hard to feel disappointment about such a restriction on FrontPocket’s part.

Is it worth it?

So, is it worthwhile? I think yes. There’s enough to get out of the application’s connection to the full-fledged “home service” to make it handy in many circumstances. If you happen to encounter any technical issues with the initial release (an issue was discovered for 1.0, which was pretty hastily corrected in 1.0.1, and the developers expect to issue version 1.1 two weeks hence), any rough patches will presumably be smoothed out in short order.

Quite frankly, if you’re an ardent fan of Backpack, and simply wish you could have some variation of it to keep with you at all times, this application will make your day. I’m 99.9% sure of it.

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Source:Mashable!

Everyone keeps wondering if and how YouTube will finally manage to monetize its vast traffic, but one has to admit they’re not just idly sitting waiting for a miracle to happen. Their latest idea, unveiled Wednesday, is simple: they’ll sell sponsored video spots for certain search terms.

It’s similar to how advertising works on Google itself. An advertiser buys a position for certain keywords; “big game fishing,” for example. Whenever someone types those search terms into YouTube, advertiser’s sponsored video will pop up above all other videos.

This is the logical next step for YouTube. After in-video graphical and text ads, post-roll advertising, as well as regular banners, they pretty much did all they could to the video itself without ruining the user experience. However, they still have the positioning of the videos to experiment with, and that’s what they’re aiming for here; most users won’t mind having a sponsored video on top of a search listing. After all, they’re used to it: it happens on Google all the time. On the other hand, advertisers will likely jump all over this; after all, it works so well with AdWords.

I don’t doubt that, in the end, YouTube will be able to monetize the many eyes that are constantly set upon its huge catalog, but even when they do, they’re not home free yet. They still need to win one big lawsuit and get big Hollywood studios to start doing business with them, otherwise the party may be moving to Hulu and its ilk.

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This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

Getting dressed is pretty easy (and not even necessary usually) for those of us that work from home as bloggers, but for everyone else, fashion can be a big deal. We’ve covered tons of different websites that try to make fashion easier, ranging from those who cover the latest fashion news to applications that let you rate what your friends are wearing.

To get an idea of some of the sites vying for top fashion site, check out our 25+ Sites for the Fashion Minded. Then, nominate your favorite using the widget below:

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Source:Mashable!

Video on devices like the iPod, iTouch and iPhone look great because of their MPEG-4 H.264 format. The good news is that there are tons of videos that you can purchase from the iTunes store, but the bad news is that you’ll go broke in a hurry downloading everything you want. Sure, some of the videos aren’t much ($1.99 each), but the numbers add up really quickly.

Thankfully, there are a slew of sites and software packages that will allow you to convert just about any video format to the H.264 mp4 format that Apple devices require. Here are the best solutions for converting videos online as well as off. Some will convert any video you have on your local computer while others will only convert videos that you find online. In any case, you will wind up with a video file in the correct format for your Apple or other mobile device.

Sites & Software

ConvertTube is a free service that converts online videos to several formats including the MP4 format that you need for Apple devices. Simply paste the video URL from sites like YouTube, Google video, MetaCafe, etc. and select the desired output format.

While the service is extremely simple to use, it must be mentioned that it can take an eternity sometimes for this service to convert even the smallest video. Sometimes it just times out or fails without any explanations. Still, most of the time it will do the trick if you want to do a quick conversion or two. For more than a handful, you’ll be better off with another solution that handles batch processing.

VideoDownloader is similar to ConvertTube except it doesn’t provide you with any output options. What you see is what you get when you download the video from the services they support: YouTube, Google, BlipTV, DailyMotion and a few others. So, if you can’t download the video .mp4 format, you’ll have to convert it with another separate utility which isn’t a big deal or expense.

Movavi Online Convert is another online video converter that provides the unique ability to download and convert up to five different online videos as one video. You can add all of the URLs and the service will send you an email with a link to download when it’s done. It could take a long time, so it’s not good if you’re in a hurry.

Videora offers an impressive suite of tools for converting and editing videos for free. The video files can be avi, divx, xvid, flv, x264, vob, mpeg, DVDs, YouTube, etc. Any of these videos can be converted into the proper video formats (MPEG-4, H.264) that play on the iPhone 3G.

Here’s Videora’s Video Converter for the 3G iPhone, which does an excellent job changing existing formats of videos you own into the MPEG-4 H.264 format. Their other converters will do the same trick for other devices such as the iPod, nano, Tivo, Sony Playstation Portable (PSP), Xbox360 and more.

There are many options when you’re converting your videos for your iPhone. Obviously, the better the quality, the larger the file size. Ultimately it’s a personal decision everyone has to make on what’s more important: space on your iPhone or audio/video quality. Personally, I prefer to stick with the highest quality video and audio because the experience is so worth it. You just have to pick and choose which videos you want to keep on your iPhone. If you have the 8 GB then perhaps you should compromise a little and choose medium or high levels of quality for video and audio. Play around and see which results you like best.

Note: All of the converters are free and appear to be spyware free without any problems. They do offer a Videora 2.0 software and service package for a fee but that isn’t required for any of these converters.

Free Studio Manager offers a staggering 20 free audio/video tools. You can choose to download all 20 utilities as one package or pick and choose those you need.

There are a few that focus on converting videos for the iPhone. For example, there’s the YouTube to iPhone converter that downloads YouTube videos and automatically converts them to the appropriate iPhone MPeg-4 H.264 format for you. Keep in mind that many of the videos on YouTube are now in the .MP4 format, so the conversion process will skip that part once it’s downloaded and determines what format the video is in. There’s a handy batch mode feature which allows you to download several YouTube videos at one time, making this process more efficient.

Here’s the Video to iPhone Converter which lets you convert any video file that you already possess without needing to download any videos from YouTube or elsewhere. The important thing to point out about this utility is that it provides the highest quality video output in this roundup, whereas Videora can generate a standard quality MPEG-4 H.264 file (24 fps, 480×320 ACC 128Kbits). Free Studio’s converter can generate a High Quality MPEG-4 H/264 file at 30 fps, 480×320 ACC 192Kbits. It might not be that big a deal to most people, but it will make a huge difference to many of you.

Any Video Converter is another free converter for windows that will convert a boatload of formats to iPhone friendly format: DivX, XviD, MOV, rm, rmvb, MPEG, VOB, DVD, WMV, AVI, etc.

Replay Converter is a media converter from Applian Technologies which is well-known for its Replay Capture Suite that includes the converter and several other products. Their most popular product is the Replay Capture tool that allows you to record any streaming audio or video much like a Tivo for the Internet.

Video for Other Platforms

Okay, okay, we won’t ignore you CrackBerry heads. Here’s AVS Video for Blackberry that’ll help you convert videos for Blackberry devices.

All of the software packages referenced above were for the Windows OS, so MAC OS users won’t be able to use them. There was a free video conversion tool for the Mac OS from iSquint.org, but they’ve stopped supporting their product. However, it’s become open source on SourceForge, so others might continue the development for this tool for the Mac OS.

How to Copy Videos to Your iTunes and iPhone

After converting all your videos to the appropriate video format for your iPhone, you’ll need to store them on your computer in the right place so that iTunes can do its job and copy the videos to your device. The best thing to do is create a new folder on your system called, for example, iPhone Videos, and copy the newly converted videos to that folder. You can also get into the habit of converting new videos straight to that folder to save steps and time later on.

Once you have your videos in one place, simply launch iTunes, click on the Movies icon and click the File menu. Select Add Folder to Library, then select the new iPhone Videos folder that you created. iTunes will then suck in all of the videos that it finds in that folder.

Click on your iPhone under DEVICES and select the Video Tab. Then Enable the Sync Movies option, and select all of the videos that you want to copy to your iPhone. You can pick and choose which ones you want at any time.

The next time you sync, all of the videos you selected will be copied to your iPhone. You can view them by launching the iPod app on your iPhone and selecting the video option.

Must-Have Video Player

Every system comes with a video player but these standard players don’t support that many formats. For example, Microsoft’s Windows Media Player does not support the Flash (.FLV) video format, which means you can’t download and play most of the videos you find online these days.

VLC Media Player is an open source media player that supports a plethora of video and audio formats. It loads quicker than most of the bloated media players and can handle most of the formats you’ll ever run into. Here’s a feature list.

Conclusion

This was just a sampling of the many cool tools out there that can help you download and convert videos into a format that you can use on your iPhone or any other device. In most cases, you can do so for free. However, some of the premium packages and services appear to be well worth their nominal fees when you consider everything they provide. In any case, you can now enjoy any of your favorite videos on your iPhone or other mobile device.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:iPhone to Offer YouTube VideosiPhone Arrives in the UK and Germany TodayiPhone to Spur Growth in the Mobile Video Industry?CovertTube: Download YouTube Clips or Buy the Whole SiteiPhone to Launch in Germany on T-MobileAdInfuse Now Has “Creepy” Ads Just for iPhonesNew Zimbra Version Utilizes iPhone’s Active Sync