Well, I’m pleased to say that I’ve finally found a powerful all-in-one multimedia package. It’s called Blaze Media Pro. You can use it as a video converter or as an audio converter – well both really. It just depends on your needs.

Now, some of you only know me from my humor blogs, but I also have two music and guitar related blogs. I’ve been saying for ages that I’ll be posting video guitar lessons and perhaps some audio clips, but I just haven’t gotten around to it because we didn’t have software that did everything we need to do to produce decent video and audio for the blogs, but with Blaze Media Pro I’ve got everything I need!

There are so many features it’s hard to know where to begin! As I said earlier the main features that you might be interested in are video and audio conversion, but you can also use it as a CD or dvd ripper and burner, editing audio and video, recording, playback, video capture, video creation, audio and video merge and much more. You can even burn VCD and SVCD with Blaze Media Pro. Now that’s a cool feature.

When using playback on a music CD you’ll discover that you can perform lyric search, MusicID audio recognition, audio tagging and so much more. This program is going to make it so much easier for me to do video podcasts on my music sites.

You might be wondering what formats this software can convert? Well it’s audio conversions include WAV, WMA, MP3, OGG, AIFF, MPEG-4, ALAC, AAC, M4A, AC3, FLAC plus it can also do two way conversions for AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, ASF, WMV, Flash (SWF and FLV), PSP, 3GP, iPod and MOV for video.

The software can be used to edit MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI and ASF formats, plus there are quite a few special effects and color adjustment operations that can be used when editing a video. Not to mention the fact that audio files can easily be insert into or extracted from the video, plus all the major image formats – GIF, JPG, PNG, RAS, TGA, TIF and more can be inserted or extracted when editing or creating a video.

If you’d like to try this great new all in one multimedia program you can buy it directly from the Blaze Media Pro website or you might want to take it for a test drive first and download their free trial version.

If you, like me, have been looking for an all in one package like this I really think you’ll be impressed with this software.

Let me know if you try Blaze Media Pro – I’d love to see what you do with it.

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Approximately one month ago I decided to join the Clickbooth publisher affiliate program. I’d heard about Clickbooth on another blog and after reading how well that blogger was doing with their affiliate program I decided to visit the site and sign up.

Clickbooth guarantees publishers the highest payout and a wide variety of advertising options. Publishers can choose to advertise in a variety of ways, for example you might choose to advertise using banners or use their innovative ad rotators which allow publishers to work with a number of different advertisers yet not clutter their sites with numerous banners as the ads can rotate in a chosen location on the website. Clickbooth also allows it’s publishers to advertise offerings via opt in email marketing, contextual pop under as well as via other methods.

I’ve also discovered that I’ll be able to use Clickbooth on most of my blogs because there is such a wide variety of advertisers working with Clickbooth that I can find advertising opportunities to suit most of my blogs niches.

Signing up for an account is fairly easy. I believe I was approved within two days. Also, if memory serves me correctly I was called by a Clickbooth representative to verify my account just prior to being approved. I thought that was a nice personal touch.

One of the things that I really like about Clickbooth is that I’ve been assigned my own personal affiliate manager. I’m able to contact her easily 24 hours a day via email, by phone or even by using AIM. She can also contact me if she has something important to tell me such as reminding me to fill out my W8 Form!

When I login to my Clickbooth account the first page I come to has a selection of offerings that my affiliate manager believes suit the one blog that I’ve registered with Clickbooth so far, as well as the newest offers and hot offers that are apparently based on my websites traffic pattern.

Not only does Clickbooth have a fairly easy to use publisher affiliate program, they also update their members of the latest happenings via the Clickbooth Blog. You can read about Affiliate industry news, behind the scenes happenings at Clickbooth, and information that is helpful to new Clickbooth publishers and advertisers.

In fact it was on the Clickbooth blog that I learned that by following Clickbooth on the Clickbooth Twitter Page I’ll be eligible for randomly awarded prizes if I respond to their tweets. Clickbooth uses Twitter to update their followers about the latest hot offers, events and of course the latest Clickbooth news.

I haven’t been with Clickbooth long enough to have been paid yet, but I can tell you that you can choose to be paid by check or Paypal. My choice is of course Paypal as I find that to be most convenient.

So if you are interested in advertising on your site and you’ve been looking for a good affiliate program I strongly suggest you take a look at Clickbooth.

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Great use of the computer, webcam and razor. Five stars!

Now if he had a second monitor or spit the screen he could really make good use of his time and check his email too!

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Ok this really isn’t my second office.

I don’t need an office in the washroom. I don’t even use the computer all that much.

My wife on the other hand … well I’d swear she’s got the laptop attached to her hip so maybe this could be her second or third office.

Do you know anyone that uses their computer so much that you wouldn’t be surprised if their bathroom looked like this?

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Last time we bought a new TV we got a DLP HDTV. It’s nice but we had a lot of trouble with the first brand that we bought. We went through three of them before changing brands! I don’t even want to think about those months of having a brand new very expensive TV that didn’t work.

So this time round I’m thinking about getting an LCD TV. An HDTV of course. Now that I’m used to one I don’t think I’d want to give that up. So I’ve been reading write ups to find out what the best lcd tvs are so that we don’t run into any problems when we buy one.

I think it’s good to do some research before you purchase something that you’re going to be using for 10 years or so. It’s not like we didn’t do any research when we bought our DLP tv, we did, it’s just that the brand that we thought had the nicest picture turned out to be one heck of a lemon!

The technology isn’t as new now, especially if we go with an LCD TV so I’m sure with a little research we won’t have a problem at all.

It’ll be a few months before we are ready to buy a TV so If any of you have HD LCD TVs and want to point me towards some brands that you’ve tried I’d love to hear your suggestions.

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The content is fully licensed and comes from major content providers such as the Associate press and Reuters.

What’s really great about The News Room is that by using content from the site I can actually make some money. Yeah, content and some extra cash too. I think it’s a pretty sweet deal.

If you want to join in, all you need to do is visit the site and sign up, and then simply browse through the various categories until you find an interesting news story that suits your site. All you need to do at that point is Mash to content. By this I mean just push the mash button in the top right corner of the content and then follow the instructions which allow you to set up how the content looks on your site and then copy the code to paste into your article. It’s really easy.

I was happy to see that I could even find cool video content that suits this site like this news story about Criss Angel the magician. Yesterday he climbed into a cube encased in concrete that suspended 40 feet over the ground near Times Square:

The bonus part about using content from The News Room is two fold.

1. I get paid a certain amount per every thousand views (CPM) for the content I add to my site, and the payout is decent. The lowest is $1 per CPM, and the highest is $4 per CPM. When you consider that a lot of affiliate ads that you can run on your sites, perhaps in your sidebars only pay about .15 per CPM you realize that this could be a pretty good way to make some cash.

2. If someone comes along and they like the video or text article that you’ve added to your post they too can click on that Mash button in the top right of the added content and add it to their own site, and you still make some money by their using the content that they got from your site.

Check it out for yourself. It’s free to use and there’s a great selection of news items to chose from. You won’t be disappointed.

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There’s nothing I hate more than getting a virus on my computer or encountering a website while surfing that causes my system to crash. These things always seem to happen when you are in the middle of writing an email, or working on a document don’t they?

How often have you lost files that you’ve been working on and haven’t saved, or that were saved in the past, but were open for editing?

It would be great if you could easily recover files that were damaged by virus attack, accidental formatting, or maybe ones that were in the recycle bin that you deleted by mistake?

Well … there is a program that can recover damaged or deleted files and folders. It’s called Active File Recovery, and it’s easy to use. You can also use the program to recover photographs and other media files, even those deleted from flash memory, or data that has been lost due to formatting a memory card.

Not only is this program really easy to use, but it also acts as an efficient data recovery tool. The Active File Recovery Software Enterprise Installation package comes with a CD/DVD ISO image that you can burn in order to get a bootable DVD or CD with a lightweight version of windows Vista that will run in RAM.

So if your system crashes and you can’t get it to boot up you can just slip the DVD or CD into your system and you’ll be able to get it to boot. This will allow you to get into your computer and perhaps use system restore to return your system to a time when it was working properly, say before you installed a program that corrupted files on your computer.

Being able to boot your crashed system will also allow you to use the Active File Recovery program to check for damaged or deleted files as well. Perhaps simply recovering a file that you deleted or that was damaged before you system crashed will be all that’s needed to get your computer working properly again.

Another thing that I like about Active File Recovery is that you can also perform a Partition Recovery. So, if you have format damage to a partition, or you’ve had disk partition loss you can repair it with the professional version of Active File Recovery.

If you’d like to use this software for your business you can get a Corporate license. There are three versions of this program – Standard, professional and Enterprise with prices ranging from $29.95 to $99. Each product comes with free updates and technical support.

If you’d like to try before you buy you can download a demo copy of this program on the main page of the site. Check it out, it sounds like a great software program.

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Doesn’t it seem like the most important programs that you use are like this?

You just start using a program, or perhaps you’ve been using it and depend on it, but suddenly right when you really need it the programs registration expires and you have to buy and updated copy or your free trial is over?

Yup. Uh huh.

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Don’t you hate having to try to remember all your passwords for the sites you enjoy visiting? In fact, you might have trouble remembering the addresses of some of those sites too.

Well, if you visit the internet from more than just your home computer you might like the program that’s been created by Grant City Ventures Inc. It’s called Spyshakers. You can create an account at the site that you’ll be able access from any computer. Store you favorite sites, login data such as passwords in your Spyshakers account.

All of the data that you input into your Spyshakers account will be kept private and secure. Your data is encrypted with a key that is unknown to all but yourself.

Set up your free account now if you like the idea of Spyshakers. You can also watch a demo of how Spyshakers works at the Spyshakers site.

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I’ve only been blogging for a little over a year now, so I’m still new enough to remember those first few months when I was trying to find this sites direction. I’m also still new enough to blogging that I can stand to learn a few more things.

SR asked me to look over an article on their blog entitled “27+1 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Blog Audience”. I was happy to accept their offer as I think this is a great article that all bloggers – new or very experienced – should read.

The article starts out with the fundamentals of blogging which is of course deciding upon a topic for your blog. Sure there are a lot of general blogs out there – some started for purely personal reasons, but if you want to attract an audience for your blog you might do well picking a niche and making your site original.

The article goes over all of the basics in easy to understand terms. There’s information about the various blogging platforms, domain names, and then it gets into the nitty gritty of building your audience. There are so many great tips in this post that if I went over them all my post would be as long as theirs. If you are interested in building your audience I strongly recommend that you read this article. You couldn’t possibly come away from it and think that you didn’t learn at least one thing if not 10 or 20!

The only thing that I think they might have discussed more had to do with comments. The article talks about the importance of allowing visitors to comment on your article. You can get feedback that way, and as you write your new posts you can write while keeping in mind what your audience has told you in previous comments. You can learn what they like, and what they respond to.

What they missed out on saying is that you should also reply to your comments. Not in new posts necessarily, but right in a posts comment section or by email. Stay in touch with your blog visitors, let them know that you enjoyed their comments. When you interact with your site visitors this often helps to encourage them to return.

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