Don’t we often wonder, can we make money on video’s we upload on YouTube. There are followers of the crazed YouTube video like “David after dentist”, and you wonder why would someone even upload it. Now, Google has a reason. With Google’s YouTube Partnership Program, if you uploaded a video that accumulates a large number or views, you might have a chance to profit ad revenue from Google. You must apply for a YouTube Partnership to get started.
Once you enrolled in the Partner Program, and uploaded videos, Google will determine if the video qualifies for revenue based on their criteria, including number of views and content. If your video is eligible for, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page and in other places in YouTube your account. If you want to earn income from your YouTube video, you will need to have a Google AdSense account.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
My take on Time’s top 50 sites
Time magazine released the 50 Best Websites of 2009. First, there’s the obvious on Time’s list, Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr (ranked no.1 ), Facebook and Twitter all made the parade. Then there’s my take on the list, based on bookmarks, there’s five sites (10% of the list) I recommend highly.
First, there’s Popurls, an aggregator, unlike Google Reader an such. This site I recommend rather than other aggregators for it recommends the most popular links (at the time) from NY Times, Google and Yahoo News, Digg, Youtube and more. Second on my bookmarks is Wolfram Alpha, a search engine with a touch or artificial intelligence. Wolfram understands your questions and tries to figure out answers rather than return a variety of links to visit to “find your answer yourself”. Although, like most computers, you must ask correctly, therefore there is a learning curve on the users side, but worth it. Next, a site I love, Fora.tv, a antidote for the poison that is YouTube. Fora.tv is a video site with content such as conferences, seminars, lectures, and news from international forums by intellectuals touching the subjects of the economy, environment, politics, science and technology. Of course, there’s Aardvark, the newest kind of search that asks your inquiries to your network. Finally, Pandora and Last.fm are considered twins and therefore tied at 32. The music sites play your choice of tunes based on artirst and songs you plant as seeds.
I award special recognition to both Metafilter and BoingBoing, having made the top 50 Best of 2009 sites and the Top 25 Blogs list.
First, there’s Popurls, an aggregator, unlike Google Reader an such. This site I recommend rather than other aggregators for it recommends the most popular links (at the time) from NY Times, Google and Yahoo News, Digg, Youtube and more. Second on my bookmarks is Wolfram Alpha, a search engine with a touch or artificial intelligence. Wolfram understands your questions and tries to figure out answers rather than return a variety of links to visit to “find your answer yourself”. Although, like most computers, you must ask correctly, therefore there is a learning curve on the users side, but worth it. Next, a site I love, Fora.tv, a antidote for the poison that is YouTube. Fora.tv is a video site with content such as conferences, seminars, lectures, and news from international forums by intellectuals touching the subjects of the economy, environment, politics, science and technology. Of course, there’s Aardvark, the newest kind of search that asks your inquiries to your network. Finally, Pandora and Last.fm are considered twins and therefore tied at 32. The music sites play your choice of tunes based on artirst and songs you plant as seeds.
I award special recognition to both Metafilter and BoingBoing, having made the top 50 Best of 2009 sites and the Top 25 Blogs list.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Seeing Chrome is more places
Yesterday I was told by a computer support technician at a particular school district, that they were going to install Google Chrome on all the schools in their district. This was revealed to them this week, having to complete that task in all grade K through 12 before the first day of school this Monday. Although, Chrome has been received well among IT professional, NSS Labs tested IE 8 to be the most secure browser at this moment. Although, an article by Microsoft Watch revealed the NSS Labs test was founded my, Microsoft, surprised?
Even though IE 8 tested well, it won’t be long before malicious attackers will find more vulnerabilities on the browser. Moreover, while Google engineers can patch and improve their product rigorously, IE 8 won’t see an update to new found problems unless it’s the second Tuesday of each month.
Even though IE 8 tested well, it won’t be long before malicious attackers will find more vulnerabilities on the browser. Moreover, while Google engineers can patch and improve their product rigorously, IE 8 won’t see an update to new found problems unless it’s the second Tuesday of each month.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Social Networking for Dummies – nay, Beginners Part 2
In continuation to my original Social Networking for Dummies (Part 1), Twitter is a broadcasting tool for social networking. Much like Facebook, you follow people or brands and post your status, also known as a tweet, to those following you. It's an effective tool for sharing information, such as an interesting news article, or even a funny YouTube video. However, you do not want to become a statistic where studies proved that the majority of tweets are meaningless chatter. I will admit, out of 100% of my tweets, maybe 4% to 6.5% fall into that category (don't ask how I got that number). Yesterday, ZDnet release a list of 100 technology experts on Twitter, it was a part of a three part series I recommend reading. I plugged in a few of my favorites that I know of that I hadn't added to my list, and to my dismay, I came to the conclusion that a good amount of higher ranked "Tech Experts", had many meaningless tweets. Which is surprising, and perhaps ZDNet generated the list based on the quantity of tweets, not quality, tech relative tweets. You can judge for yourself on a page I built that links to the users tweets.
I leave you with this, Twitter, as described in the picture below, is a young social networking tool, but smart nonetheless. Of course, as part of this series of Social Networking for Dummies, the almost popular comic by ~elontirien, stereotypes the social network sites. MySpace being the obnoxious, albeit, jokey site, versus Facebook, smart and cool, Wikipedia is the nerd with no style and without a girlfriend, while Google is the “know it all”. Finally devianArt is the creative type and YouTube, ruthless future drop-out.
Monday, August 17, 2009
The Cloud, be aware
On a Facebook comment, a friend of mine brought up “Cloud Computing” when he said “this will change eventually with cloud computing, once we have gone back to the mainframe paradigm”. Wait a minute, mainframe, nay. Let me explain. The “Cloud” is a buzz word for the Internet. Since in network diagrams, a cloud represents the Internet in the drawing. This is not a lesson on Cloud Computing, rather a precaution on Cloud Computing.
The comment on Facebook was in reference to a netbook, and my friend mentioned a mainframe. Cloud computing is not about connecting to a 1960’s IBM System 360 Mainframe machine, rather, the concept is that of dumb terminals connecting to the Internet, which is interconnecting to a network of networks, or network servers. The network servers are much like mainframes, ranging from Power Volt Data Storage servers to Apache Servers on Linux or SQL Database Servers on Windows. In Cloud Computing, all you will need is a computer with a browser. Much like a netbook, which is a small computer, scalable enough to run web applications. The goal of Cloud Computing to have functional software on the internet known as Web Apps. Google is a perfect example with Google Apps, where you can utilize online to create or modify Word and Excel documents to databases. With Cloud Computing, everything will be online, or on a server.
I recently signed up with DropBox, and I began to worry about Cloud Computing. Like DropBox, you can utilize up to 50 Gigs of space to store file data. Anything from picture to research papers. I’m not 100% comfortable with leaving data online that I’m not sure I want to share. Services like DropBox have terms and conditions, perhaps not all your data you save on their “cloud” is safe. Possible it might be shared for research or educational purposes. If the next generation is in the “cloud”, be aware, I rather carry an external harddrive, or write my own cipher.
The comment on Facebook was in reference to a netbook, and my friend mentioned a mainframe. Cloud computing is not about connecting to a 1960’s IBM System 360 Mainframe machine, rather, the concept is that of dumb terminals connecting to the Internet, which is interconnecting to a network of networks, or network servers. The network servers are much like mainframes, ranging from Power Volt Data Storage servers to Apache Servers on Linux or SQL Database Servers on Windows. In Cloud Computing, all you will need is a computer with a browser. Much like a netbook, which is a small computer, scalable enough to run web applications. The goal of Cloud Computing to have functional software on the internet known as Web Apps. Google is a perfect example with Google Apps, where you can utilize online to create or modify Word and Excel documents to databases. With Cloud Computing, everything will be online, or on a server.
I recently signed up with DropBox, and I began to worry about Cloud Computing. Like DropBox, you can utilize up to 50 Gigs of space to store file data. Anything from picture to research papers. I’m not 100% comfortable with leaving data online that I’m not sure I want to share. Services like DropBox have terms and conditions, perhaps not all your data you save on their “cloud” is safe. Possible it might be shared for research or educational purposes. If the next generation is in the “cloud”, be aware, I rather carry an external harddrive, or write my own cipher.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Password Strength and Protection
How does one protect their password, and what damage can be done if someone obtains your password? If you have a computer, you should know how important a password is by now. However, you probably are not sure how vulnerable your password might be. Obtaining a password can cause havoc, especially if you use the same password on all your accounts. Therefore, anything from your email to bank accounts can be access by unwanted crackers.
It's very simple to do this. Remember the Sarah Palin incident with Yahoo mail, even Paris Hilton's mobile phone book of celebrities. The majority of people have email accounts on multiple free networks such as MSN, Gmail or Yahoo. These services offer a password recovery page where anyone can access just by knowing your email address. The recovery pages asks a number of questions about you, and anyone that can guess the answer, can pretty much access your email. How is this relevant if it simply resets your password? Well, clever as one can be, they can attempt to access another account, maybe a bank or credit card account, and have the password sent to the email account they already have access to. And so it begins, anything tied to that email address, or forwarded to that address is now valuable to an attack.
How can this be avoided. I have recommendations to avoid a simple attack. First off, on your free email accounts, named above, make sure they are still active. If you haven't used that account and it is disabled, anyone can reuse that account and receive email as you. Also, don't use birthdates, or spouses middle names, even pet names as a recovery question. Select any question as your recover question and use a simple work you can remember, like "pancake" for the answer. This will be harder for anyone who knows you to attempt in recovering your password. Secondly, choose a strong password. With so many pins and account password one needs to remember, it's easier for people to choose "oreocookie" or "iloveyou" as a password. These passwords are easier to crack. Simple words or compound words even can be cracked in seconds by dictionary brute force software.
A good password must be tested by security expert recommended tools. I suggest a convention where you use a long word and utilize numbers, uppercase and special characters on words you will remember. Take a word you will remember, in this case we'll use my full name, gabrielvilla. My name is a weak password, however, if I utilize uppercase letters and a special character in the middle, Gabriel_Villa, it's stronger. However, names can also be compromised with brute force attacks very easily. Therefore, I suggest using more special characters and numbers to lieu or letters, therefore you remember the password and you get in the habit of utilizing more special characters. For instance, use "$" instead of "S", or "3" instead of "E". Therefore, when plugging in the password, Gabri3l_Vill@, it results it to be a strong password. You can use password generators that create passwords like mvE@6m8!, also strong, however, it's hard for one to remember that at times.
Now that you created a strong password, do you need to create a different password for every account you have? The real answer is “Yes”. However, I recommend a tip to utilize your same password and adding an extension to each account you use. For instance, think of the color of the header in the site your will log into, and perhaps that could be the extension, like at Yahoo, your password could be 'Gabri3l_Vill@-white' and at MSN 'Gabri3l_Vill@-blue'.
It's very simple to do this. Remember the Sarah Palin incident with Yahoo mail, even Paris Hilton's mobile phone book of celebrities. The majority of people have email accounts on multiple free networks such as MSN, Gmail or Yahoo. These services offer a password recovery page where anyone can access just by knowing your email address. The recovery pages asks a number of questions about you, and anyone that can guess the answer, can pretty much access your email. How is this relevant if it simply resets your password? Well, clever as one can be, they can attempt to access another account, maybe a bank or credit card account, and have the password sent to the email account they already have access to. And so it begins, anything tied to that email address, or forwarded to that address is now valuable to an attack.
How can this be avoided. I have recommendations to avoid a simple attack. First off, on your free email accounts, named above, make sure they are still active. If you haven't used that account and it is disabled, anyone can reuse that account and receive email as you. Also, don't use birthdates, or spouses middle names, even pet names as a recovery question. Select any question as your recover question and use a simple work you can remember, like "pancake" for the answer. This will be harder for anyone who knows you to attempt in recovering your password. Secondly, choose a strong password. With so many pins and account password one needs to remember, it's easier for people to choose "oreocookie" or "iloveyou" as a password. These passwords are easier to crack. Simple words or compound words even can be cracked in seconds by dictionary brute force software.
A good password must be tested by security expert recommended tools. I suggest a convention where you use a long word and utilize numbers, uppercase and special characters on words you will remember. Take a word you will remember, in this case we'll use my full name, gabrielvilla. My name is a weak password, however, if I utilize uppercase letters and a special character in the middle, Gabriel_Villa, it's stronger. However, names can also be compromised with brute force attacks very easily. Therefore, I suggest using more special characters and numbers to lieu or letters, therefore you remember the password and you get in the habit of utilizing more special characters. For instance, use "$" instead of "S", or "3" instead of "E". Therefore, when plugging in the password, Gabri3l_Vill@, it results it to be a strong password. You can use password generators that create passwords like mvE@6m8!, also strong, however, it's hard for one to remember that at times.
Now that you created a strong password, do you need to create a different password for every account you have? The real answer is “Yes”. However, I recommend a tip to utilize your same password and adding an extension to each account you use. For instance, think of the color of the header in the site your will log into, and perhaps that could be the extension, like at Yahoo, your password could be 'Gabri3l_Vill@-white' and at MSN 'Gabri3l_Vill@-blue'.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Web Elements
As part of Google Services for Websites, Google's new Web Elements are handy segments, or widgets if you will, of Google products for your sites. Among the products include Goggles Maps, Calendar, YouTube News and more. Google's Web Elements makes is easier to include content to your site. For instance, If you have data that you want to share on your site, or graphs based on data, you can use the spreadsheet web element which allows you to upload a spreadsheet to Google Docs, and share the data on your site. If and when you change the data on your spreadsheet online with Google Docs, the data on the site is updates. This is a wonderful tool is you need to provide pricing for products or services. I will demonstrate the ease of this service.
You do this by going to Google Web Elements, and selecting the segment you want. Let's take for instance YouTube News. You select a News Provider, in this case, Fox News. You will see a preview of it and immediately below you have the code you need to copy and past to your site, as I will do below.
Google provides API's to utilize Google Services for Website to further enhance your sites. Among Web Elements, which is my favorite thus far, Google has added more services such as Page Speed and Google Translator.
You do this by going to Google Web Elements, and selecting the segment you want. Let's take for instance YouTube News. You select a News Provider, in this case, Fox News. You will see a preview of it and immediately below you have the code you need to copy and past to your site, as I will do below.
Google provides API's to utilize Google Services for Website to further enhance your sites. Among Web Elements, which is my favorite thus far, Google has added more services such as Page Speed and Google Translator.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed
Breaking News from Mashable states that Facebook has acquired Friendfeed. This is a perfect example of the Grasshopper becoming the master.
News Release from Facebook.com:
PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 10, 2009 — Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.
“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”
“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”
Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.
“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."
FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.
News Release from Facebook.com:
PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 10, 2009 — Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.
“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”
“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”
Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.
“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."
FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.
Vark! Then next method of search
You hear of Bing, and of course Google and Yahoo. Of course, each have their own algorithm of searching, and for the most part, many of the search engines return similar results. These search engines are considered the three major search engines, battling out to return top web sites. At times, you might need a more specific answer, or in many cases, suggestions. Where the big three search engines return web sites, sometimes you need real answers. In comes Aardvark. at Vark.com.
Aardvark, or Vark, works unlike any other search. When you join, you configure your profile to search your questions via instant messenger including Google Talk, AIM, iChat, MSN Messenger and even Twitter. You may also be configured to receive questions and answer back, you are not going to be spammed with IM's all day. When you create a profile, you will be asked for topics you may fit in to answer question when necessary. Topics range from Theater to Psychology and jQuery and Engineering to my favorite, computer programming. You may even ask about animals or even math homework. The way this works is the network you are part of will be consulted first on your questions on the search. For each questions, six people will be contacted based on your questions category or topic. Not all six will accept your question, however, you may receive up to two answers, and within five minutes. All this is done via your instant messenger of your choice. When you configure the IM on your profile, you will receive a member or contact, Aardvark. You enter your question as a message to Aardvark on your IM, and will receive the answer from there as well.
I highly recommend Aardvark. If you find yourself in forums asking question with no results in days, or you sometimes want to get a suggestions form live persons rather that a search engine, you defiantly need Aardvark. Join here, Vark.com.
Aardvark, or Vark, works unlike any other search. When you join, you configure your profile to search your questions via instant messenger including Google Talk, AIM, iChat, MSN Messenger and even Twitter. You may also be configured to receive questions and answer back, you are not going to be spammed with IM's all day. When you create a profile, you will be asked for topics you may fit in to answer question when necessary. Topics range from Theater to Psychology and jQuery and Engineering to my favorite, computer programming. You may even ask about animals or even math homework. The way this works is the network you are part of will be consulted first on your questions on the search. For each questions, six people will be contacted based on your questions category or topic. Not all six will accept your question, however, you may receive up to two answers, and within five minutes. All this is done via your instant messenger of your choice. When you configure the IM on your profile, you will receive a member or contact, Aardvark. You enter your question as a message to Aardvark on your IM, and will receive the answer from there as well.
I highly recommend Aardvark. If you find yourself in forums asking question with no results in days, or you sometimes want to get a suggestions form live persons rather that a search engine, you defiantly need Aardvark. Join here, Vark.com.
Friday, August 07, 2009
Tech Tools for Daily Use
Being that I work in technology, there are certain tools that I recommend for daily use. These tools are essential to consolidate the already overwhelming accounts for email, messaging and social networks. I will assume you have some or all the following services: Twitter, Facebook, MS, Yahoo and/or AOL instant massagers and various email accounts. Lets begin with Gmail. Utilize Gmail to consolidate all your email accounts into one. Gmail will enable you to receive mail from other accounts by setting them as a POP account. The other great feature of it is that you may reply from the email as the account it pertains to. When you use Gmail, you will save time checking emails, avoiding having to log into various accounts. Here are Ten ways Gmail makes email easy. If you need an invite to Gmail, leave a Comment beginning with "GMAIL INVITE".
Moving on to social networks. To broadcast news and information, people like me utilize Facebook and Twitter. There are other social networks such as MySpace, Friendfeed, etc. When posting a feed, many either post a message to one site and a different message to the other. To keep with the consistency, I use a tool called Twhril with Ping.fm. Twhril is a tool for Twitter,posting a message to your account page. When applying Ping.fm, your Twitter message will also post to a social site that you configure, in my case, Facebook. This is done by utilizing an application key, creating an account on Ping.fm, configure Ping.fm to send messages to you Facebook account and create an application key. Then add the application key to the Thwril program's setting.
Finally, even with all the new technologies, I still use my Instant Messengers. With, account on MSN, Yahoo and AOL, I refuse to install all three IM programs. Therefore, I utilize Trillian. Trillian is a tool where with that one application, you may configure up to three IM's (AOL, MSN and Yahoo so far.) There is nothing too complicated to it.
These are essential applications to me, making it easier on my day to day activities and keeping in touch.
Moving on to social networks. To broadcast news and information, people like me utilize Facebook and Twitter. There are other social networks such as MySpace, Friendfeed, etc. When posting a feed, many either post a message to one site and a different message to the other. To keep with the consistency, I use a tool called Twhril with Ping.fm. Twhril is a tool for Twitter,posting a message to your account page. When applying Ping.fm, your Twitter message will also post to a social site that you configure, in my case, Facebook. This is done by utilizing an application key, creating an account on Ping.fm, configure Ping.fm to send messages to you Facebook account and create an application key. Then add the application key to the Thwril program's setting.
Finally, even with all the new technologies, I still use my Instant Messengers. With, account on MSN, Yahoo and AOL, I refuse to install all three IM programs. Therefore, I utilize Trillian. Trillian is a tool where with that one application, you may configure up to three IM's (AOL, MSN and Yahoo so far.) There is nothing too complicated to it.
These are essential applications to me, making it easier on my day to day activities and keeping in touch.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Apple Microsoft Partnership Anniversary and Twitter is Down
What a day! On this date 12 years ago, big Redmond (Microsoft) invested $150 Million worth of market priced non-voting shares of Apple, Inc. If you fallowed the Yahoo-Microsoft story, or what people are calling Micro-Hoo, it seems like déjà-vu to the Apple-Microsoft partnership.
In other news on this date, Twitter was hit hard by a Denial of Service attack, bringing Twitter.com to it's knees. The service has been down all morning. Oddly enough, I added my Twitter feed to this blog yesterday and I haven't been able to view it at all.
In other news on this date, Twitter was hit hard by a Denial of Service attack, bringing Twitter.com to it's knees. The service has been down all morning. Oddly enough, I added my Twitter feed to this blog yesterday and I haven't been able to view it at all.
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