Available for both Windows and Mac operating systems, TechSmith’s free Jing Project seems to combine elements of Snagit and Camtasia for easy online video creation.  Once you’ve installed the program, Jing allows you to:

• Capture an image -or- record a video of what you’re doing on the computer; and
• Share your project online.

When you are creating a video, you can talk into your microphone and record step-by-step instructions.

Here’s a cute video that explains what Jing does and why it was created:

Jing’s output for Images are always in PNG format and videos are always in SWF format.  You can immediately upload this information to your free Screencast.com account or onto your server.  You can also save the file and modify the code a bit so that your video can be uploaded to YouTube, as shown here:

For those of us who help others with their computers or are educators, the free Jing Project is a tremendous resource.  Visit the site and bookmark it … it’s one of those freebies you’ll be wanting to use at some point.

Have you noticed the new “listen now” icon that shows up under the blog titles?  It’s compliments of a service called Odiogo, which does a surprisingly good job of generating audio content on the fly.  Although the narrative is computer generated, the quality is fairly good.

Why Try Odiogo?

For me, I thought I’d give the free service a try for two reasons.  First, I was looking for a solution to offer visitors who may be visually impaired without my having to do a lot of work.  Odiogo definitely delivers!  Second, I was interested in creating additional unique RSS feeds.  Again, Odiogo delivers.  You can take a look at the “podiocast” feed by clicking on the feed icon.

What You Get With Odiogo.

Odiogo is absolutely free for bloggers and has a paid option for news sites that are not based strictly on CMS platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, BlogEngine.NET and Terapad.

For the blog reader on the go, Odiogo’s audio output can be listened to on iPods, MP3 players and mobile phones, with a “streaming” output of several feeds or just one feed.  Rather than calling the output a “podcast,” Odiogo describes its audio content as a “podiocast.”  A podcast is usually created by a real live human, whereas the high fidelity, artificial intelligence “text to speech” product from Odiogo is called a “podiocast.”

The “podiocast” MP3 files are stored on Odiogo’s server, which means that your blogging server is not filled up.

For heavily trafficked blogs, you might receive some revenue from Odiogo’s advertisements.  These small ads appear as audio messages right before your content.

Odiogo Is Easy to Install.

Perhaps the best feature offered by Odiogo is that it is so easy to install.  You visit the site, type in your blog’s URL or feed URL and your email, and Odiogo generates a plugin on the fly.  In the case of Wordpress, FTP the plugin into your wp-content/plugin file and activate it.

Once activated, the “listen now” icon shows up automatically under your titles and the audio content is created without any technical knowledge on your part.  The feed icon is generated as a widget that you enable within your “design” section of the administrative portion of your blog.

Give Your Blog a Voice.

Odiogo is 100% free, so if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to generate audio content on your blog, check it out.

A Couple of Quick Tips.

Since we’re dealing with artificial intelligence and not a real live human recording, I noticed a couple of things that might help enhance the audio quality.

• Avoid placing captions in your images, or if you do, maybe note that they are captions.  Be sure to put a period at the end of your caption.
• Put periods in your headers or subheadings.  When there is no punctuation, Odiogo’s system reads all of the words as one sentence, so it will sound like a run-on sentence and not make sense.
• Configure your RSS feed so that it displays the entire article.  Odiogo “transcribes” what appears in the feed, so if you only include the first couple of sentences or first 100 words, the audio will stop, leaving the listener with useless information.

The computer, the Internet and the latest social media opportunities have transformed how we share and process information.  We can publish our opinions immediately on the web, send Tweets to CNN news, Stumble about our marketing wares, or Digg our favorite news stories.  With respect to public opinion, the Internet is playing a huge role in politics nowadays with its instantaneous delivery of blunders, gossip and news.

The Fleeting Nature of The Written Word

We’re all writers now. We don’t have to go through book publishers, have our opinions or essays reviewed by a news editor, or spend a bunch of money on billboards or printed advertisements.  As consumers, it seems we’re processing gigabytes of information on a daily basis.

As wonderful as they are, these things are short lived. Sure, they may mobilize political action groups.  They may create social change.  But our personal messages will probably not be around next year, next month, or even tomorrow for that matter.  Tweets disappear within seconds and are quickly replaced by new messages.  Blogs may crash (like this one did) and their messages unread.  Ebooks may serve a short purpose, but they will disappear over time.  And with today’s technology, who knows how long web sites will exist as we currently know them.  It’s within the realm of possibility that people will be able to access the Internet with a brain implant.

When you think about it, it’s quite mind boggling.  My grandmother remembers driving a mule-drawn “school bus.”  My mother learned how to type on a manual typewriter. I remember how proud I was to finally get Windows 3.0 and a 386 processor.  What we’re doing now will probably be obsolete in 5 or 10 years.

This weekend, I had an opportunity to visit Canyon de Chelly (pronounced ‘de shay’) on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona and was profoundly struck by how fleeting our written messages are today.

In 1931, the United States listed Canyon de Chelly as a national monument. It is described as one of the oldest cultural resources in the country. In fact, the Navajo people still live and farm at this “monument” which they call home.

For centuries, the Canyon was the stomping ground for the Navajo (Dine) people and an earlier group known as the Anasazi. The Anasazi are not a Native American tribe — the term is used to describe a cultural group that emerged sometime around 1500 BC.  Today, the Navajo still farm at the bottom of the Canyon.

There is no park entrance fee.  You drive into the monument from Chinle.  Along the way, there are various ruins and points of interest that you can stop at and either view from afar or hike into.  Paid jeep tours will take you through the bottom of the canyon.  One of the most famous sites is Spider Rock, shown below.  I took a picture of a National Park Service sign that explains the significance of this famous formation.

Timeless Messages Etched in Stone

At each point of interest, Navajo artists and vendors will greet you and try to sell you their wares.  You’ll be greeted by weavers, who will sell you colorful, handmade Navajo rugs at a fraction of retail costs, jewelers and other artists. The products sold are reminiscent of the Navajo culture and way of life that has existed for eons.  Some offer rock art that reproduces some of the petroglyphs that are found within the canyon.

Perhaps the ancient petroglyphs are the predecessors of today’s Tweets and email messages.  Conveying news of water, hunting and growing seasons and spiritual messages, the petroglyphs stand out clearly in the wind-swept facades of the canyon.

Pecked into stone, the petroglyphs at Canyon de Chelly may have been written hundreds and hundreds of years ago by the Anasazi people or early Navajo people.  Unlike today’s messages that blast out with the speed of thought and quickly disappear, the petroglyphs have withstood time and their meanings handed down over the generations.

Calvin Thomas is one of the artists that I met at a lookout point at Canyon de Chelly.  This young Navajo man specializes in rock art that depicts the famous petroglyphs found within the canyon.  Like many of the native people, the meaning of the petroglyphs has been handed down over the years.

Using his art, he explains some of the images:

Forget About Smelling Roses.  Peck on a Rock.

It’s easy to get so immersed with building and promoting web sites that we lose all sense of time.  I know for myself, a 12-18 hour day is typical.

The common wisdom is to stop and smell the roses.  I’d prefer to stop and check out the magnificent eye candy nature has to offer by taking a hike.  And maybe one of these days, I’ll peck a message onto a rock (on my property, of course).  Unlike my Tweets, blog posts, RSS feeds, Shouts, Diggs and the rest of it, the old fashioned petroglyph message will withstand the time.  I just need to figure out something meaningful to say!

There’s a fantastic new service that launched today called InLinks, and as a blogger or someone who wants to increase search engine rankings, it’s well worth a visit.

inLinks are static HTML advertisements located within content areas of websites. inLinks’ FAQs describe these advertisements as “simply the most natural paid link on the market.”

If you are running other ad programs on your site, you can still use inLinks because they are not contextually served. This is great news for Adsense or other paid-per-click contextual ad publishers!

Payments for your ad revenue are made on the 1st of each month by Paypal, with no minimum.  Alternatively, they can be paid to a debit card available through the program.  In this case, there is a $25.00 minimum before funds are deposited into the card.

You can easily set up inLinks on your Wordpress, Drupal, Moveable Type, or Ruby on Rails site.  I set it up on this blog, which runs on Wordpress, in just a couple of minutes.

Once you’ve signed up and confirmed your account, your first step is to submit a site. After you’ve typed in your URL, Just click your CMS platform and then select “generate code.”

CAPTION: In the 1st step, submit your URL and then select your CMS platform.

The inLinks system will generate a code on the fly.  Since we’re using Wordpress in this example, a plugin was generated for immediate download.

CAPTION: In the 2nd step, download the plugin.

FTP your plugin into the wp-content/plugins folder of your Wordpress.

CAPTION: In the 3rd step, upload your plugin.

Finally, log into your administrative settings and activate the plugin and your done!

CAPTION: In the final step, activate your plugin.

JOIN:

Even the best planned goals are set aside sometimes due to situations beyond our control.

But it gets even better.

Like you, my business tends to get busy and I don’t always have time to sit down first thing in the morning and write a blog post.

That’s where WordPress can really be a secret weapon for your content writing — you can schedule your posts.

I left last Thursday for an undisclosed location on the Navajo Reservation.  Since it’s unlikely that I will be able to get on the Internet and post, I’ve written all my daily blog posts on Wednesday night, the 12th.  With WordPress, you can do the same thing but instead of publishing immediately, edit the publishing time and set it to whatever you want.

Here’s the proof.  The articles shown as “scheduled” in the screen shot below have published by now.

Look at all those scheduled articles!

If you’re ready to install your own Wordpress blog but are not sure how, check out Wordpress Goldmine. You’ll learn the basics, plus discover how to earn a profit from your Wordpress blog.

There’s a handy tool that you can use with either Firefox or Internet Explorer that’s called SEO Quake.  I prefer Firefox, so the images in this article come from the toolbar that I installed on Firefox.  I’m assuming that the toolbar will look the same on Internet Explorer.  I haven’t tested it on Explorer.

I can toggle the toolbar on or off.  The SEO Quake toolbar gives you information at a glance so you don’t have to look it up.

The SEO Quake Toolbar

Here’s a closer look at the left side of the toolbar, which gives information about this blog site, NotGuru.com.

A closer look at the toolbar.

It’s a fairly new site and as of the last Google Page Rank update, it has a Page Rank of 1 (the first button on the toolbar).  It shows that 168 pages are indexed by Google, 5,937 pages are indexed at Yahoo, there are 6,421 inbound links and indexed pages showing in Yahoo, and 53 pages indexed at MSN.

To see what pages are indexed at Google, all I need to do is click the button (the one that shows I:168) and a new page opens that shows what pages are appearing in Google’s index:

Pages indexed in Google.

In the image below, I clicked the Yahoo button that reads 6,421 and can see the sites that are linking to the notguru.com domain as well as pages within the domain that appear in Yahoo’s index.

Yahoo links and indexed pages.

Finally, by clicking the MSN button, I can see the pages currently indexed with MSN.  This number tends to go up and down quite a bit, but I seem to get quite a few MSN Live hits to pages that do not show in the index.

Pages indexed at MSN.

In the center of the toolbar, you can easily see the Alexa page rank, De.licio.us links and other information.  When you install the toolbar, you can click on any of the buttons (such as De.licio.us) and see more detailed data.

Center of the toolbar (close up)

Another neat feature of SEO Quake is the expanded tools, which I accessed by clicking the SEO Quake icon:

Additional features.

Not only can you get information about your own sites, but you can use SEO Quake to analyze the SEO of your competitor’s websites.

If you want more space on your browser window, simply toggle the toolbar off and it disappears until you turn it back on.

SEO Quake is free, although donations are accepted.  You can get a clean download directly at SEO Quake’s site, which is http://www.seoquake.com .  Once you have installed this easy-to-install plug-in, you’ll be thrilled with the information delivered.  What’s really sweet, at least with the Firefox version, is that an automatic update installation is provided whenever the toolbar is upgraded.

Real Live SEO at Work

Why is SEO important?  You make money.

Here’s a video that shows what is possible by focusing on MSN for your top keywords:

{movie will play directly on movie site}

Some of the shouts are still somewhat political, particularly about allegations that the Obama administration has a socialist agenda.

What is Capitalism?  What is Socialism?

Here are some videos about the theories of socialism and capitalism.

The first one, about socialism, is not a philosophy that I personally subscribe to, nor do I agree with most of the statements that the video makes.  However, it does give a good idea about socialist thinking.

This second video is an educational film produced in 1948 and gives a good overview of what the concept of capitalism means and some of the issues surrounding it. Given the age of this production, some of the terminology is hilarious … but you’ll get the picture.

TOP SECRET SPECIAL OFFER - Can A Person Be Free of Both Capitalism and Socialism?

A few years ago, I participated in a top secret program which is probably one of the most liberating programs available.  I it is my honor and privilege to invite you to join this elite group of aspiring millionaires and freedom seekers.

For the last ten years multi-millionaire Stuart Goldsmith has been running a secretive group called Inner Circle.

He shows his members how to get more money, greater power and total freedom in their lives and holds over 800 letters of grateful thanks from students who have made anything from $1,500 to $750,000 thanks to Stuart.

Membership is strictly by private invitation only! As a reader of this blog, you have special permission to check out the Inner Circle.  I have to warn you, however, that if you are accustomed to thinking “inside the box,” are addicted to television and common behavioral escapes, and want approval from those around you, the Inner Circle may not be for you.  Quite frankly, it may be offensive to many people who hold rigid standards.

You should understand that Inner Circle never advertises in the press or publications for people to join. Each and every member has to be personally invited.

This will be an exciting process of self-discovery and achievement for you.

Since taking the course I have gotten completely free from all debts, bought and paid cash for a piece of rural land (which has always been an unfulfilled dream up to this point) and built a little debt free cabin.

I highly recommend the training to anyone who wants greater success and personal power in life.” - Donel Lincoln

Because of this exclusivity, members of Inner Circle are honored and often cause a little jealousy. After all, few people like the idea of privilege, wealth, power and freedom - in others!

By electing to join Inner Circle, you will, in a very real sense, establish yourself as a self-leader; the sort of person who is serious about changing your life for the better.

This country desperately needs successful, business minded people to act as an example of what can be achieved - independent, free-thinking people like you, capable of handling success, without abusing that power and privilege.

Please take a few moments now to discover what others have gained by joining Inner Circle.

If you have a sense of adventure and a certain pioneering spirit; if the prospect of increased knowledge, power and freedom calls to you, as it did to us all, accept this invitation and join Inner Circle.

So act now, today, before the moment passes.

I will be removing this link because it is a special offer.

Membership of Inner Circle cannot be bought, it is FREE and by invitation only. All you ever pay for is the pack of training materials.

If you decide not to stay after 60 days, let us know. Your place will be passed to someone else and anything you have paid will be returned in full. And you may keep everything sent to you, free of charge.

Here is the link again: Top Secret Membership to the Inner Circle