My good friend NickyCakes is giving away a 40″ Samsung 1080p LCD HDTV!

FIND OUT HOW TO ENTER HERE!

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If you’re a safety-minded, compatibility-oriented person looking for a lot of variety, there are tons of online music services offering downloads. The two main types of these services are;
1) Subscription based - These services, like Napster, require you to pay a certain monthly, weekly, or yearly fee, and then claim to offer you unlimited free downloads during the time of your subscription. The benefits of this is that USUALLY, they’ll offer you truly unlimited tracks, and are usually relatively cheap. The problem is, it’s hard to find a “catch” and usually don’t let you put the tracks on whatever MP3 player you’d like without an external plug-in. Services like these, if reliable enough, are great for people who LOVE music, and want to get as many songs as possible. Another problem is, usually these services delete the files from your computer after your subscription runs out.
2) Per-song paying - These are, somehow, BY FAR the more popular pay-based music stores. The most popular is probably iTunes, which costs $.99 per track, and offers a ton of variety. But iTunes uses their own AAC codec, which limits the usage of their songs with other media players with more features (such as, just as an example, Windows Media Player). Luckily, there are programers out there who work to fix that. iTunes only allows you to use their music with your an Apple iPod (unless you download another program), creating a mini-monopoly.

That’s pretty much how the VAST majority of online music services function. Stay tuned for a post which will talk about two potentially revolutionary services; Yahoo Music Unlimited, and iTunes Total.

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We would like to remind you to get out and vote tomorrow no matter who your candidate of choice is.

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Okay so say you are viewing a site that has lots of little section with text in it (I am using a proxy listings site as my example).

Normally, dragging your mouse from one point to another would get everything in between. This prevents you from highlighting one perticular column or row without getting everything else that’s on the side.

However, I realized that there is a simple trick that lets you highlight only the row/column/or perticular sections that you want to highlight. Instead of just clicking and dragging, you hold down the Ctrl key and click and drag over the row you want, the column you want, or just click and chose which exact areas you want to highlight (as you can see in the following picture). Then as always, you simply Control+C to copy as you would normally.

In this case when pasting, it would turn out the following information:

__

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My question is what will happen, if people two sites such as Yahoo and Gmail both want to use their usernames and passwords on a site accepting the OpenID system, but who both have the same usernames. I realize that now they probably won’t allow people to register names that have been used in the system, but what about duplicated that already exist? Anyways it just one of the many small issues that OpenID will have to work out, but the idea of one centralized system controlling all accounts would make all of our lives just that much easier. I’m definitely looking forward to the day we’ll be able to use the same username and password on every major website on the internet. Boy, that sure would be a change of pace!

Read the full story at TechCrunch…

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1. Open up a text editor such as NotePad.

2. Inside the text document, put the exact URL of the audio file on the first line (only works for the MP3 or WMA audio extensions).

EX: http://www.domain.com/music/song.mp3 or
http://www.domain.com/music/song.wma

Note: In order to have it stream more then one song, just put another song on a new line as many times as you want as it will stream them in that order.

EX:
http://www.domain.com/music/song1.mp3
http://www.domain.com/music/song2.wma
http://www.domain.com/music/song3.mp3

3. Save the text file as a .m3u file.

EX: song.m3u

4. Once you have created your m3u playlist, make sure that you put the music file(s) and the m3u file in the same folder. In this case, they would both need to be in the “/music/” folder.

5. Finally, insert this cross-browser Media Player embed code into the webpage.

<OBJECT ID="MediaPlayer1" CLASSID="CLSID:22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95" CODEBASE="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab# Version=5,1,52,701" STANDBY="Loading Microsoft Windows® Media Player components..." TYPE="application/x-oleobject" width="280" height="46">
<param name="fileName" value="http://www.domain.com/music/music.m3u“>
<param name=”animationatStart” value=”true”>
<param name=”transparentatStart” value=”true”>
<param name=”autoStart” value=”true“>
<param name=”showControls” value=”true”>
<param name=”Volume” value=”-300“>
<embed type=”application/x-mplayer2″ pluginspage=”http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/MediaPlayer/” src=”http://www.domain.com/music/music.m3u” name=”MediaPlayer1″ width=280 height=46 autostart=1 showcontrols=1 volume=-300>
</OBJECT>

Note: All of the blue fields are those which can be changed. The value for volume “-300″ is mid-ranged. If you change it, you need to change it for both values.

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DoFollow Blogs

These blogs are readily available on the internet and are some of the easiest backlinks to get. You simply write a comment, put in your name, and in the url box you put in your website. It is extremely simple and doesn’t take much time. When doing this though, please actually read the post and write a comment that is relevant and at least two sentences long.

You can find lists of these blogs by simply Googling “DoFollow Blogs”.

Don’t Spam

While I do appreciate those who want to get their site ranked, I extremely dislike those that spam. Not only is spamming bad for the blogesphere, but if a few people do this on one site, it is extremely likely that the blog owner will NoFollow his blog and then all that work is wasted. Also, most comments these days are moderated before available on the site.

–

I leave you with this information, so go and get some backlinks people!

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It is also important to specifically something perticular in that keyword. My post “Tree Trimming for Beginners” is a good example of this. In the larger category “trees”, it more locally targets “trimming”. This goes along with the theme of my blog, yet also brings in traffic and more diverse ads to my blog.

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The site is www.ForestCentral.com

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Besides AM, I have a couple of other projects under way. These projects are going to take up most of my free time during the school year, and will thus make it difficult for me to put away some time for affiliate marketing. A bit later in the year though, I plan on coming back.

For those about to get started, realize that you are going to need to spend a lot at the beginning, and will probably come out in the negatives. If you are serious about affiliate marketing, spend at least two months doing research and then have at least five hundred dollars to put into it.

In other news, you may have noticed that the blog theme here at TP was getting changed a lot. That process should now come to an end because this theme completely and utterly rocks.

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After running the offer for a couple of days and spending almost $10 on promoting it, I talked to my affiliate manager at Copeac and asked him why the leads in my campaign weren’t crediting. He didn’t know what the problem was at first, but he figured out the problem after I showed him the URL that I was using.

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On August 6th I started my first working campaign promoting a PPL (Pay Per Lead) offer for which I used Copeac. I am using pay per click traffic from Google AdWords to promote my leads.

It has been four days since I first ventured into affilate markating, and I am in the negative with -$13.00.

I spent $38.39 advertising with Google Adwords.

I earner $25.30 from the PPL Campaign.

Although I am at a loss, I am still in a positive mood because I am still figuring out witch keywords work and which don’t. I hope that by then end of next week, I will be able to post a net profit.

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Full Article

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Point System

TNX.net has created a system in which you buy and sell links with points. In this system, 1000 points cost just over a dollar. Each one of these points can buy you one link on a PR0 site, but the higher the pagerank the more points necessary to buy a link. The following shows how many links can be bought with 1000 (about $1) points based upon pagerank:

1000 PR0
20 PR1
10 PR2
5 PR3
2 PR4
1 PR5

The points can also be sold back to TNX.net for cash. In this way, you can either use the points you earned to advertise on other’s sites, or you can cash in and reap the rewards.

When joining TNX, you are instantly given 2000 points. You can earn an additional 5000 points by posting on this thread in the DigitalPoint forums. An interesting thing about the point system is the fact that the value of one changes each and every week. TNX states that the cost of points raises about 2% each and every week. In this sense it is like a savings back, in which the longer amount of time and the more amount of points you have, the more the points are eventually worth. They also have a great affiliate program which you should definitely check out.

Link Choice

TNX sets itself apart not only with its point system, but also that it allows you to choose which links you would like to have on your site. This is very refreshing, because many if not most other services have the advertisers choose the publishers and this discriminates against the smaller sites. Shouldn’t all sites be treated equally? Exactly, and TNX has utilized this need and provided a solution to it.

Overall

I am pretty happy with the TNX system overall as it is very easy to use, includes many useful features that other services lack, and the design is simple and easy on the eyes. From an advertisers point of view the system is very appealing due to the pricing, and the system can be a great source of revenue from a publishers point of view, especially if you have a highly pageranked site.

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Sign-Up Link: MySearchFunds
Concept: Make money every time you search by using the ASK search engine.
Installation: Add another “search engine” in your search box located in Firefox, IE7, etc…
Pay: The conversion from Euros to US currency is about 3-4 cents per search.
Usual Revenue: Every 25 searches is about $1 so you’ll usually make $30-$120 a month.
Payment Method: Check or PayPal.
Location: Works in over 160 countries.
Experience: I have been payed twice and am very happy with the service thus far. I complete about 50 searches daily and therefore make about $2 . I have cashed out twice, once for $56 and the other time for $65. I have actually started to like ASK search engine much better than Google’s search engine because of some of the extra features it provides.

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It is really easy to sign up. I would suggest that everyone at least give the service a try!

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1) Yahoo! Music Unlimited - This is one of the best services for online music that I have seen. Sadly, they’ve removed Yahoo! Music Unlimited To Go, which allowed FREE transfer to portable players with a subscription.

With Yahoo! Music Unlimited, from now on to be referred to as YMU, you can download unlimited songs if you want to be able to play them on your computer. The subscription costs $5.99 per month if you subscribe for a full year, or $8.99 on a per-month basis. However, if you want to have tracks that you can burn onto a CD or place on your MP3 player (aka .WMA format), you need to pay an additional $.79 per song. On the other hand, CURRENT iTunes costs $.99 per song, with no additional fee (keep in mind that Apple will probably release a subscription-based service of their own). Therefore, to be more efficient with Yahoo! Music Unlimited, you need to download over 360 songs per year in “burnable” format that you can place on your MP3 player or burn to a CD. Although they say you can’t put it on your iPod, it’s very easy to convert these files to MP3’s that can be placed on the iPod (perfectly legally, I figure). While 360 songs sounds like a lot; there’s another key factor - no 30 second samples. iTunes lets you listen to 30 seconds of any song for free before buying it, while Yahoo! Music Unlimited lets you download the ENTIRE song to your computer FOR FREE. Sadly, when you quit paying for a subscription, the files are no longer playable on your computer. Bundled with Yahoo! Music Jukebox, Yahoo! Music Unlimited is really a great service. However, it does cost a lot of money - and with the cancellation of YMU To Go (meaning no more subscription-based transferring to an MP3 player), it really went downhill. However I just found a service by the name of SoundTaxi that actually converts from these DRM protected formats to burnable formats, for only 40 dollars. For $120 a year, you get unlimited music that is perfectly legally. If you really want to bend the rules, you can pay for 1 month of subscription, download all the music you want (like I mean THOUSANDS of songs), SoundTaxi it, and voila! I would recommend signing up for a month to see if you like it, and give your iTunes a break (you only need to download 45 songs in that month to make it more efficient than iTunes if you pay per month). What brings Yahoo! Music Unlimited above the other subscription services? Well, it’s got a great selection for a great prices. Plus, there are rumors that Yahoo! is expanding it’s services even further, so expect word on this in the near future! Yahoo! Music Unlimited is definitely superior to Napster in my eyes.

2) iTunes Unlimited - So far, this is a complete rumor, with almost no factual evidence other than an article on the Financial Times. Last year, Nokia released a “comes with music” plan that allows people to download ALL the music they want from the Universal record label with the purchase of their multimedia device. Apple is considering releasing a similar feature with the iPod. The fact that Apple should do something, and do something quickly, is evident in consumers and Apple executives alike. We’ve been paying $.99 per song for the past few years just to get it onto our iPods. We want something different! (By we, I mean the law-abiding citizens who own iPods.) All that remains is the question of how is Apple going to organize this? That’s something I’ve been trying to find out. I am almost positive that whatever Apple decides to do will only be available with the purchase of a new iPod, a scheme that they have been using over the years to get you to pay more and upgrade.

• Option 1 - Unlimited Subscription Based w/Purchase of iPod.
  • How this would work is that when you go to buy an iPod, it will go for its regular retail price. However every month, an additional $XX will be tagged on to your bill, while songs themselves will be free to download. A recent statistic baffled me when it said that the average person with an iPod only buys 15 songs from iTunes in their lives. This would create an extremely large bond between bands/record labels, Apple, and the customer. This seems like a very good option for Apple, but the real question is whether customers would be up for it?
• Option 2 - Unlimited Downloads with the Added Price of iPods
  • How would this work? It’s very simple, when you go to buy an iPod the price will be increased by what I presume to be a three-digit number. With the iPod plugged into your computer, or maybe even with a retail code that you enter into iTunes instead of the Credit Card #, you can go to iTunes and download all the music you want onto your iPod. I don’t know about you, but I’d definitely be willing to pay an additional $200 for an iPod limited not by my budget (or willingness to break the law), but by the hard drive size of the iPod.

• Option 3 - Cheaper Songs from iTunes
  • When you enter a code that you would receive when you purchase an iPod (probably for an additional sum of money), the price of songs would go down from $.99 to a price determined by Apple. This would be nice because it could give people who don’t want to have unlimited music yet want to have more music an equal opportunity.

While nothing is definite about Apples tactics, it seems to me completely essential for their survival in the future.

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1) Studies show that one in five Americans will at one point in their life start a businesses
2) Sadly only 20% of these businesses will last to be 5 years old.

This means that although 48 million Americans will start a business, most of them will not be very successful and will not last that long.

Why do so many companies fail to survive?

This is truly the million dollar question, and there are many theories out their pertaining to why they don’t. Usually, people do not readily prepare themselves for the mess that they are going to step into because the business world is not kind to anyone. It is like a jungle, in which it is every man (or animal in this case) for themselves.

One wealthy businessman once said that everything in this industry is based on luck, unluckily luck doesn’t exactly make you millions of dollars. Starting a company does not mean that you can take long vacations and have three day weekends. Oh no! If you think that starting, but especially maintaining a business is easy, think again. It requires many hours of work and in case you have back up money, you’re going to have to do it in your spare time will you work at another job. You’ve gotta be serious about it! Commit yourself entirely, don’t spend money at some fancy restaurant to reward yourself, instead put it back into the business.

So how do you make sure that your startup wont becoming a total disaster?

Here are some tips:

• Be organized - This is essential; without organization your
  startup is bound to fail, no question about it.
• Stay positive - I wrote about the importance of being positive in my last post. Keeping your employees and yourself happy is essential to productivity, and being positive not only makes others work harder, but will actually create a better environment in which to work in.
• All press is good press - Understand that even if others are criticizing your work, they will send you possible customers and will help you get your name out there.
• Learn from your mistakes - If there is a problem, take care of it
  in the most appropriate way. Learn from it, and make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Once you have made all of the mistakes they’re are to make, you will be a very knowledgeable person.
• Work in a productive environment - If that means getting off your butt and going to the nearest by coffee shop, then by god do it! Make sure that you work in a neat and organized environment, in which you find yourself in focus and nothing distracts you.
• Take classes - It may sound pointless, but statistics show that
  people with degrees in business, finance, and even online course
  credits are much more likely to succeed.
• Get a lawyer - If you’re a startup company aiming at a new market, make sure
  that whatever you’re doing is legal before you invest too much time and money. Make sure that you are not infringing copyright material, because getting sued could completely destroy your business.

Stay tuned for more tips!

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You miss a lot of opportunities when you’re not positive. For instance, say that you are trying to get a job. The manager meets with you and listens to what you have to say. If you say it negatively, chances are that the manager is not going to hire you. Ask yourself this question, “Who would want to work with a negative person?” In fact, who would want to even be friends with a negative person? See how this can affect you? See how important it is not to be negative?

People live their lives, and as they do so they want to be happy. It’s plain and simple, negative people do not make you happy. It’s not like you would want to go out and have lunch with someone who is going to be frowning while the food comes, at least I know I wouldn’t want to.

Put a Smile on Your Face

One way to show others that you are positive is by putting a smile on. No, I am not referring to that McDonald’s Campaign. I am instead saying that people in general are attracted to other happy people.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you actually are feeling bad, you shouldn’t show it. If you must be sad or angry keep it to yourself because people are very judgmental and you never know what someone might stereotype you to be.

“If you think about disaster, you will get it. Brood about death and you hasten your demise. Think positively and masterfully, with confidence and faith, and life becomes more secure, more fraught with action, richer in achievement and experience.” ~Edward Rickenbacker

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• The steps to fix this are really quite simple. First, open up the flash video with no audio. Right click and choose “Settings” on top of “About Macromedia Flash”
• In the pop-up window that appears, select “Advanced.” This should take you to a Adobe’s website, where they will try to fix your problem.
• In the Table of Contents on the left side of the screen, under the Settings Manager category, click on Global Storage Settings Panel.
• After clicking, on the right side of your screen there should be a Settings Manager interface. Make sure the checkboxes saying “Allow third-party Flash…” and “Store common Flash…” are both checked. If they already were, this is not your problem, so view the next two possibilities. If they were unchecked, check them and restart your browser, and try the video again. Hopefully, it helped. If not, the other two possibilities are not out of the question.

2) You are missing the required Codecs, or the Codec can’t be properly read

• If you are missing the Codecs, this is a very easy fix. The best package for audio/video codecs is definitely K-lite Codec Pack. There is version 3.8, but if the problem isn’t the lack of codecs it’s just that they are malfunctioning, you’ll have to download version 3.3.0 which will be a bummer. A download link to get version 3.3.0 can be found here.
• I’d recommend letting the installation wizard take you through and just click next when prompted. However, you want to make sure the Codec Tweak Tool is being installed (it should by default).
• After installing all the codecs, try the video again. More often than not, nothing will change. Keep reading, though! The fix might be on the way!
• After downloading and unpacking K-lite Mega Codec Pack 3.3.0, find the directory to which it is saved, and go to the “Tools” or “Components” subfolder. You should find an executable file by the name of Codec Tweak Tool (if not, you can always do a handy Windows Search).
• In Codec Tweak Tool, uncheck all of the boxes EXCEPT the boxes next to “Detect broken codecs” and “[Registry] Fix non-working system sound,” as shown in this image:

• Please note the newer versions of Codec Tweak Tool DO NOT have this option. MAKE SURE you downloaded 3.3.0 (the download link was provided earlier).

• After it is done, restart your browser and try again. Hopefully, it fixed your problem. If not, don’t worry - the fix is on its way!

3) The Registry is messed up - this is a common issue.

• If all else fails, this is probably the issue. If it’s not, then it’s a problem with the sound card, not the actual flash player. Please use this with caution - it involves editing the registry so PLEASE follow all instructions VERY carefully.
• First, go to “Start –> Run” and type in “regedit” without the quotes. Please keep in mind that whenever quotes are used, not to type them in.
• If you understand Regedit, here is the path you must follow: “My Computer –> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE –> SOFTWARE –> Microsoft –> Windows NT –> Current Version –> Drivers32.” After you get to Drivers32, skip down to the bottom of this section (search for SKIP TO HERE) as I explain to less advanced readers how to get there.
• In the left panel, you should see something resembling; [-] My Computer. Click on the [-] and you should see HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, HKEY_CURRENT_USER, etc. Click in the [-] next to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
  
• The tree should expand, and you should see options to click on the [-] next to Hardware, Sam, Security, Software, and System. Click on the [-] next to SOFTWARE. A lot of branches should appear, so scroll through until you find Microsoft. Click in the [-] next to Microsoft.
• This next step is very important, and if you click something wrong you could be in a lot of trouble. Scroll down in Microsoft until you find Windows NT. MAKE SURE YOU CLICK ON THE [-] next to WINDOWS NT, not Windows or something else. The first option should be “Current Version,” so go ahead and click the [-] next to that. Scroll down a bit until you find the folder Drivers32. This time, DO NOT click the [-], but click the folder itself.
• If you knew how to use Regedit, SKIP TO HERE. Anyways, on the right side of the screen now you should see many different entries. The first step is to scroll down towards the bottom and click on “wavemapper.” Go ahead and delete that entry entirely - it probably got poorly modified and stopped working. Next, go to “Edit” in the top-left panel, and click on “New –> String Value.”
• Edit the name of this value to “wavemapper”, EXACTLY like that, only without the quotes. Then, double click on this new entry and edit the string value to “msacm32.drv”. I’d recommend copying and pasting that, because a typo will make everything stop working.
• Voila! You’ve just cleaned that entry, so exit Registry Editor and go to the video you want to see. Sadly, you won’t be able to fast-forward or rewind these videos, but you can watch from beginning to end. I haven’t been able to find a registry value that effects fast-forwarding and rewinding. I’ll upload a video on YouTube with detailed instructions soon enough

I hope I’ve been helpful to you, and your YouTube or other flash videos start working again! If ALL ELSE FAILS, search your ENTIRE hard drive for a file by the name of “msacm32.drv” (without the quotes). If that is missing, you should copy it from another hard drive (upload it to the internet somehow and download it), and place it in your C:/Windows/System folder. Alternatively, you can download it from the internet - but this is not recommended as there have been many viruses disguised as msacm32.drv, so it’s best not to risk it. A fifth and FINAL alternative I don’t want to get into is ripping these videos onto your computer (there is plenty of software/add-ons that let you do that) and seeing if that works.

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“On February 17, 2009, federal law requires that all full-power television broadcast stations stop broadcasting in analog format and broadcast only in digital format.”

It will be a sad day when this happens for the environment, and possibly the economy. While the government might be giving out $40 coupons in order to help people buy approved converter boxes, the truth of the matter is that most Americans are going to go out and buy new televisions, even if it’s tight on their budget.

What will this do to the environment?

Many people are going to be throwing away their old analog televisions, causing a huge amount of waste all over the US. Do you know how many people own analog televisions? Let me just say it’s a lot, and it’s pretty easy to figure out that many of them are going to buy new televisions. A huge amount of Americans don’t think “eco-friendly”, thus it is easy to conclude that many lead-filled televisions are not going to be responsibly thrown out, making this problem even more daunting.

For those of you who do care about our future on this planet, their are many environmentally-safe ways to get rid of these televisions. Check out MyGreenElectronics, a service that allows you to find local business that will dispose of your TV (and other electronic) waste.

What’s the deal with these $40 coupons?

“Since January 1, the federal government has been offering households two $40 vouchers to defray the cost of designated devices, which cost $50 to $70.”

The government is going to be dishing out nearly 22.5 Million Coupons($900Mil) in order to provide a smoother transition to DTV through coupons for digital converter boxes. Don’t be too happy though, because you are of course paying for these yourself through your taxes.

The last day to get these coupons, is going to be March 31, 2009. These coupons will expire about three months after they have been issued.

Consumer groups have been arguing that more coupons are going to be needed to support this transition. When these coupons run out, Congress might authorize another 11 Million coupons($450Mil) for Americans. The NTIA Website states that the agency will be sending out vouchers starting February 17, 2008.

You can find more information over at the NTIA Website.

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