I've been showing you some screenshots from my interactions with ChatGPT, you can see a couple already posted here.

However, something has been bothering me about one of my recent interactions with ChatGPT. I asked it a simple question, but it gave me an odd response that made me feel like the AI has been programmed with a certain, hmm how should we say...? "political bias." Essentially, many interactions have shown me that ChatGPT is "woke."

Here's some background: I saw a friend's Facebook post asking "what animal comes to mind when you think of thick thighs." (I'm paraphrasing). I didn't care about the reasoning behind the question, but I thought it would be interesting to see what ChatGPT would say.

But instead of answering the question, it gave a response that felt like it was implying that I was using the AI for a degrading or demeaning purpose.

Let's take a look at the screenshot.

I don't understand why this response would be included in ChatGPT's programming. The question is simple and neutral, and the AI has no context to interpret it that way. It seems like is pretty obvious that this response can only come from the people who created and trained the AI, and it makes me wonder if they've intentionally added this sort of "woke" response logic.

The correct or more human-like response should have been a list of animals that seem to have "thick thighs" from a human's perspective. Or it should have said, I don't know what you mean by "thick thighs", OR perhaps you can give me some context to be able to answer more accurately.

I hope this is just a glitch or a fluke and that the creators of ChatGPT are working to fix it. But if this is a deliberate move and it continues, it concerns me. Next post, I'll have the rest of this ChatGPT conversation.

The post Unveiling the “Woke” Agenda in AI: A Personal Experience with ChatGPT. — Is ChatGPT Woke? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

So I asked chatGPT about it. This screenshot isn't about the company itself at all which apparently is still in business, I just wanted to give you some content. But this is about chatGPT lying. So much, just like a human. Here's example number one. I will have more later.

So you see the contradiction. Ah, the lies I tell ya! - Ok, Chat GPT, if you don't have information about specific companies how you could answer the 2nd question?

By now I understand how this works and why it can answer one and not the other. Obviously, it's a data set issue, but did you figure it out yet?

The post ChatGPT Prompts and Commentary #002 – ChatGPT is a Liar! appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I hope to make some videos about it and share some tutorials, but for now, I'll share some of my prompts. I feel like some of these should be self-explanatory, but Here's the first one:

I knew the ultimate answer to this one because, currently, there is no way to do what I asked it to do; it was odd that it gave me an answer that ignored my request to make it a batch action, and specifically said I wanted to avoid doing it by hand, one at a time.

Sometimes it flubs like this. Or did I goof? Based on some new tricks, I might have found a way to ask a better question. Maybe I'm the one that messed up on this one. This was one of my early prompts.

If it isn't clear where it (chatGPT) made the mistake is that the tutorial only allows me to export the files one at a time by hand. It doesn't help me do what I wanted which is to export all the cut sections of the project into individual videos independently, in sequence, and automatically.

If you aren't a video editor, what I mean is that I want to know how I can take a 5-minute clip for example, and mark it or cut it in the places where I want to extract certain segments from and then automatically have the editing program, Final Cut Pro extract each of those segments into their own files. Doing this by hand in Final Cut Pro can be a pain in the you-know-what.

And before you totally dismiss it as a failure, look a the next prompt, #2.

The post ChatGPT Prompts and Commentary #001 – How to do this in Final Cut Pro. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I lost interest because I didn't care for the proprietary aspect of it. And I thought we would all just move to the cloud; everything would be in the cloud, I had resigned to the idea that was just the way it was going to be.

And for the most part, most people that want to have what I call "cool and useful" tech, like home-automation, or pantry-inventory, are in fact using cloud services, or apps. There's an app for everything; nevermind how much of your information they collect!

Despite being a technophile, I do not trust most online services. Ring cameras? no, thank you, they share your video with anyone basically. I've been very slow to adopt any sort of "smart" device into our homes, no Siri, no Alexa. We use some Google home devices, but we unplug them when not in use.

I don't like the privacy compromise.

But I've now been learning a lot about open-source software and hardware that replicates pretty much all of the "smart devices" functionality that is commercially out there but with no-cloud and no-internet-required parameters. There's even a "Siri" or "Alexa" type of assistant called Genie.

This is good! Free, open source, private. Good!

Ultimately, I would like a home server/network setup vaguely resembling this:

• Home Assistant server for automations,
• A big NAS (50+ TB),
• A media server accessible easily from any screen device in the network.
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Movie Collection
  • Music Collection
  • Locally downloaded podcast subscriptions
• Multi-cam monitoring & security system with "a doorbell feature."
• Grocy
• Pi-Hole

I want to add a media player like Kodi maybe, and a Google photos replacement like Libre. For now, I have a Home Assistant box, Pi-Hole and Grocy running. They're all running on individual virtual machines directly on my laptop with Virtualbox.

This configuration obviously is not ideal since the services are unavailable if my laptop is unavailable. But at least I am getting to play with them and learn what they can do.

Wouldn't it be cool to integrate Grocy into Home Assistant and have Home Assistant automatically add items to a grocery list the moment you consume one of your must-have ingredients? This could be done for food ingredients or household consumables like dish soap or laundry detergent.

Take it a step further, imagine integrating a computer in your car connected to the ODBII sensor which in turn alerts you of upcoming oil change and adding oil to your shopping cart, or tells you when your car has any kind of trouble or needs some sort of service.

For a car computer, I would like:

• List of obvious things like Navigation, Bluetooth calling, etc.
• A big-screen android display.
• Automatically download podcasts, and select videos to local storage when connected to the home's WiFi.
• Run up to 24+hours on a dedicated battery; the battery automatically recharges while driving.
• ODBII integration.
• TPMS.
• Integrated with data/cell service, so it should be able to accept a SIM card.
• Would be nice to have the device be a hotspot as well (but this is debatable).
• Integrate various sensors and monitors to a dashboard.

Those are lofty goals, but it's fun to imagine those. Back to what I have for now.

Pi Hole

The easiest to start was PiHole. I setup a small Virtual Machine, installed basic inimial ubuntu linux and then followed the Pi-Hole instructions.

Cox, my ISP does not allow me to change DNS servers on the router we have from them, so for the time being I set a number of devices to use the Pi-Hole by configuring their own network settings.

Ideally Pi-Hole would be the DNS service for all devices network-wide, and this would then prevent ads from getting to any device within the network. But using it only in a few devices lets me learn the system and also fine tune it before making all the devices be forced to use it.

So far it is working ok. At first, the percentages of "queries" blocked was under 10%. After googling around a bit I found that there are lists all over the place which you can include in your blocklists. This helped bring that percentage to about 15% and so far it's been around 16 like the screenshot shows.

Pi Hole is cool, but it's far from perfect.

I would still recommend using Brave with the shields up as the default browsing environment for most people. Pi Hole's purpose is for all the other devices that cannot use Brave as a browser, the main example is my TV.

Also, sometimes I have to use Firefox, or Chrome, heck I use Vivaldi and Opera in a regular basis too and I always miss Brave's ad protection. This is where Pi Hole helps a bit by just blocking access to ads altogether.

What about Grocy?

Grocy is an inventory control system for your kitchen. It's perfect to help you manage your pantry, fridge, and freezer. If you keep it updated, you can quickly see what you have in your house when you want to make dinner. It can also keep track of chores and the members of the family that are assigned to each chore.

Grocy lets you keep track of your recipes and it can easily generate shopping lists based on recipe ingredients that are currently missing from your pantry. It can also generate shopping lists based on pre-determined thresholds. You could program it to always have 2 jars of pasta sauce on hand, so when your inventory goes lower than 2, it automatically adds pasta sauce to your shopping list.

The downside of Grocy is actually using it. It's been a challenge getting anybody besides me in the house to use it. I think the solution for this will be some NFC stickers that we can just trigger with our phones.

There is a way to integrate Grocy with Home Assistant, so it can alert you when things are low or remind of chores that need to be done.

That's it for now.

The post New Projects – Pi-Hole, Grocy & Automation appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Uphold describes itself as the place to trade "anything to anything." And while that's a pretty broad and bold statement, it is obviously a marketing campaign to attract traders, they can't possibly trade any crypto for any crypto.

They do, however, have an incredible long list of cryptocurrencies you can trade. A lot more than I see available on other big exchanges.

Check it out here: sign up with Uphold with my link here, and they'll give you $20.00 and give me $20.00; we both win. And you get to trade XRP.

I use Uphold to trade BAT, XRP and HBAR.

There are other benefits Uphold offers, like integration with other apps and staking right in the platform.

The post Where Can I Buy XRP if I’m in the United States? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

As I've been preaching for years, YOU need a website. It used to be that only publishers, bloggers, or sellers would need a website, but nowadays with the future of the Internet at stake, everybody needs a website. Heck, I have a website for my kids, I locked in their domain names long ago.

Censorship and control in social media are at an all-time high. Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, and every other social media platform out there have control and censorship guidelines that are restrictive and censorious at worst, murky at best.

You could post something that seems innocuous to you but inadvertently puts your account at risk of suspension or outright deletion. This happened to me.

I've had my own TikTok videos restricted without a clear understanding of why.

This is why you need a website. Yes, build an audience on your favorite platform, use Instagram, use TikTok, use Facebook even. Use whatever social platform you want, but always have a place that is your own, and make references to it frequently as a place for your followers to connect.

A website can be simple, one page with a "sign up form" where your followers can join your email list, or find what other platforms you're involved with. This way, in case you get suspended, restricted, or simply move on to the next "big thing" your friends, fans and followers can still find you.

The original video from Tiktok is here, and it's part of a series that I'll document here on the blog. If you want to jump ahead and get hosting, Inmotion Hosting (my host & sponsor) is currently having a sale where their Power plan is the same price as their Launch plan, check it out here.

The post You Need a Website – TikTok Series (Part 1) appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I thought it was pretty nifty. After a while, I found better ways to do this, for example, Acorns. The Acorns service does the same thing, but better and it also lets you add recurring savings programs and round-up multipliers. You can ask it to automatically take a certain amount every month and put it towards your savings and investment goals

Update 2021-12-29

I'm disappointed and I should have done more research before jumping into this. Please note, RoundlyX might still work for you, but it won't work for me. Acorns (mentioned below), actually withdraws the round-up amounts on a regular basis, so you don't really notice it in your bank account. RoundlyX doesn't.

For all intents and purposes, RoundlyX is just a glorified savings/investment plan that you still have to monitor and execute. If you decide you want to buy crypto in increments of say, $50.00, then RoundlyX will monitor your account and when you have accumulated that amount of "spare change" they will withdraw that entire amount $50.00 and make your purchase on your behalf. In other words, you're better off using your exchange's own recurring buy system to just buy $50.00 every month and save yourself the fee of RoundlyX.

This might work for you, but it won't work for me; YMMV. I've already canceled my Acorns account and will probably cancel this as well. I also use Digit, which I think can easily replace both services. Here's a Twitter thread where I had an exchange with the RoundlyX folks if you want to read it.

TL;DR

RoundlyX has a "spare change" round-up savings program that allows you to buy crypto automatically. It tracks your transactions, rounds up to the nearest dollar, and then takes that amount and buys whatever cryptocurrency you want in your favorite exchange, you can sign up here.

Acorns basically invests your spare change for you

The best difference between Acorns and a regular "keep the change" program is that you can have Acorns invest the money for you.

You don't get to pick individual investments, instead, you pick the levels of risk, moderate, conservative, aggressive, and they take care of investing it. I guess it is similar to how you invest in a mutual fund.

The returns aren't going to make you rich anytime soon, but they're better than the fraction of a percentage you get from a regular savings account with any bank today.

But now everything is going to the blockchain and crypto, so it was just a matter of time before someone replicated the spare change savings idea into a crypto-based system. RoundlyX just rolled out earlier this year.

RoundlyX buys cryptocurrency with your spare change

Enter RoundlyX. RoundlyX is the same as Acorns in principle, but instead of investing your spare change into mutual funds, or stocks or EFTs, RoundlyX buys crypto for you.

This could be one of the easiest ways to stack sats, without any effort on your part.

The account is pretty easy to set up, there are no complicated steps to create wallets or copy and paste your codes and all of that stuff that often comes with working with the emerging crypto space.

RoundlyX uses Plaid to connect to your bank and immediately starts going through your transactions to grab the "spare change."

Similar to Acorns and other "keep the change" and "save spare change" programs, they have multipliers, so you can accelerate your savings by adding a 2x, 3x, or 10x multiplier. So that if your transaction was $10.35, RoundlyX will take 65 cents, but with a 3x multiplier then the savings will be $1.95.

Once you accumulate $45.00 in your RoundlyX account, RoundlyX will buy the cryptocurrency of your choice in the exchange of your choice, the options include any token or coin traded in some of the big exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini, Binance International, Okcoin, and others.

I've signed up for this now and have it active, I have canceled my Acorns subscription too, there's no sense in paying for that if I'm not going to use it. That's another benefit with RoundlyX, their service is only $1.00/month (the first month is free). Acorns plans start at $3.00/month. There's nothing wrong with Acorns as far as I can tell, and my experience with them has been great. But the future is here and the future is crypto.

If you haven't started using, accumulating, and transacting with cryptocurrencies, this could be the easiest way to dip your toes in the water with minimal risk. Check it out here if you want to join.

A Brief Introduction Video of RoundlyX

Here's an intro video about how you can use them to buy crypto with your spare change.

The post Save Your Spare Change in Crypto With RoundlyX appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

A satoshi (sat) is the smallest unit of Bitcoin you can buy. In case you didn't know, amongst the many differences between Bitcoin and regular currency, is that one single Bitcoin can be divided into 1,000,000,000 pieces. Each one of those is one satoshi.

The analogy to regular currency, like the U.S. Dollar is like this. Think about 1 dollar being the "whole" unit, while 1 penny is 1 tiny fraction of a dollar. In the same way, 1 Bitcoin is a "whole" unit, while 1 Satoshi is a tiny fraction of that.

Stacking sats means buying satoshis.

Before Bitcoin's value shot up, past a few hundred dollars, it was inexpensive to buy a full coin. But as the price of Bitcoin (currently around $60,000 - check real-time prices here) goes up, buying a full coin can be out of most people's reach. So instead of buying full bitcoins, you can buy satoshis which are of course a lot more affordable. The whole goal is to "HODL" Bitcoin, meaning buy and hold as much as you can.

Currently, as the price of Bitcoin hovers around $60,000 USD, you can buy around 1600 satoshis with $1.00. If you want to check this in real-time for an accurate price, you can use a USD to Satoshi calculator like this one.

Now that you know what stacking sats means, check out this video, it's my response to @BrainnHarrington and why I decided to write this post, and now you know.

The post What does Stacking Sats Mean? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I've been learning about cryptocurrency for a while now. Enough that I'm going to share a few things here and there as I learn. Blogging about it will hopefully help me understand things better.

First, KYC is an abbreviation and it stands for Know Your Customer. It's often used in Marketing, Sales, and other industries.

So what is KYC when it comes to cryptocurrency?

KYC stands for know your customer. KYC in cryptocurrency is similar, to KYC in banking and finance, and investing. When you deal with KYC, it means the institution knows everything about you and monitors your account, transactions, and other activity.

One of the things that makes many cryptocurrencies attractive to the users/buyers/traders is their ability to be traded anonymously. I get it that not all cryptocurrencies are anonymous and that in some cases even if you try, it can be nearly impossible to maintain 100% anonymity.

But you have to consider this, as more and more authorities get involved with crypto, the more regulations that come into place. When you use a mainstream cryptocurrency exchange, like Coinbase, or Robinhood, then you have to reveal your personal information.

This information is required for you to participate in their services, and they need the information for the purpose of implementing KYC protocols, processes, and compliance.

Once you sign up for an exchange, like Coinbase, they now know who you are and they know their customer, they KYC. KYC is a system and collection of processes and protocols that verify the identity of a person transacting business. Generally, this is done in response or in compliance with self-imposed policies, industry regulations, and/or government regulations.

KYC in the investing world

KYC is used in the investing world which also affects cryptocurrencies now and will more in the future. Investopedia says this about KYC:

What Is Know Your Client (KYC)?

The Know Your Client or Know Your Customer is a standard in the investment industry that ensures investment advisors know detailed information about their clients' risk tolerance, investment knowledge, and financial position. KYC protects both clients and investment advisors. Clients are protected by having their investment advisor know what investments best suit their personal situations. Investment advisors are protected by knowing what they can and cannot include in their client's portfolio. KYC compliance typically involves requirements and policies such as risk management, customer acceptance policies, and transaction monitoring.

- Investopedia

But your bank, doctor, insurance, and investors all use KYC

This isn't too bad, right? I mean if you've always and only dealt with Fiat money for your entire life until now, you've always given the bank your information, so this is similar right? The bank uses KYC almost anytime you deal with them. Your doctor does too, your insurance agent does too.

Yes, this is exactly like your bank.

It's okay to share information with them until it's not. It's okay for them to know who you are until the authorities request access to your bank account because they want to investigate it and your bank simply gives them all your information.

What is KYC you ask? That's what KYC means.

It means they literally know you and verify your identity when you transact with them. In crypto, you try to avoid interactions where you are exposing your identity. - Here's a great article that helped me understand more about kyc.

Think of real-life and how you can meet with someone in private and exchange cash for goods or services. Imagine they give you the cash, and you give them the goods; nothing more, nothing less. You don't ask for ID, name, date of birth, or anything. They also don't know who you are. You complete the transaction and remain [mostly] anonymous.

That's more or less how you want to do transactions in crypto, anonymously. If I understand correctly, when you're dealing with big amounts or long-term investments, you want to avoid KYC institutions as much as possible. I guess part of avoiding KYC is that you most likely will need cold storage or a cold wallet. I might tackle that subject next.

So that's really it for now. Being that this is my first post about cryptocurrency, I'll leave it at that short and sweet.

The post What is KYC in cryptocurrency? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

LastPass keeps your passwords, secure notes, and using the matching browser extension or app on your mobile device, it can autofill passwords when you need them.

Lastpass goes one step further and lets you share a username and password with someone else without actually revealing your password. This is particularly useful when you need a staff member, or a consultant to log into one of your accounts but you don't want to actually share the password.

They're currently running a special for Earth day, offering a 25% discount. I would definitely recommend you take a look if you don't already use it. Here's the link to check it out.

The post LastPass Earth Day Sale 25% Off appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But as I was trying to come up with some new graphics for the homepage, I noticed that my images were being served from a Jetpack-based URL. This served as a good reminder to be mindful of the size of the new banner I was making.

I thought I'd share some thoughts about image size with you if you're interested. After I finished my design, I went to export the image from Photoshop and this is what I found:

Using PNG

The image is 680px by 358px. Initially, I wanted to export it as a PNG to take advantage of the transparency in case I decide to change the background color where the image is going to be displayed. This means that If I changed the background on the website, I wouldn't have to update the banner image to match. But this made the total image size 167KB. This image alone would be almost as heavy as the homepage without it, as you can see in the previous post the homepage is only 228KB right now and I'd love to keep it under 1MB ?.

Using JPEG

The easiest answer to reducing the size of this image was to use the JPEG export option instead of PNG. JPEG has better compression and the size difference is a significant gain. Compromising on making the background a solid color, white in this case isn't a big deal, so I tested that out. Using JPEG reduced the image by over 50% to a size of 89 KB. Huge difference!

But then if I'm going to use JPEG I also should also reduce the quality during export. I remember reading years ago somewhere that people can't tell the difference between an image exported at 100% quality vs one exported at 85% to 87% quality so I turned the quality down to 85%. This brought down the size by another 36KB for a total size of 52KB; that's a little bit less than one third from the original PNG size. Can't complain about that!

But what about WebP

Ideally, I should use WebP if I want the smallest size, but for the sake of expediency, I'll leave that for a round of fine-tuning that I can do after launch. Doing this right now could add more work, more time, more plugins, or all of the above. And I'm already late in launching this. Besides, I did a quick test by converting the full-size PNG that I mentioned to WebP and it turned out to be 47KB, not a huge difference between that and the JPEG.

TL;DR

If that was too geeky for you, or too long for you, when you create images you need to keep quality high but also mind the size of the images so your visitors can have the best and fastest experience you're able to offer. In this example, I reduced an image from about 167KB to 52KB, a size savings of about 70%. If you're using Photoshop, use the export to JPEG feature, not the save as feature, and reduce your original image quality to 85%. If you're not using Photoshop, maybe you're using something like Canva, you can find a ton of image optimizer sites out there.

The post When Almost Every KB Counts appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I've also given the advice freely to hundreds of people, many who suck the time and effort it takes to provide said advice and move along without even a mere thank-you and never apply said advice.

Their response is usually, "oh that's nice, but that's too hard." Or they have some other excuse about how they just can't do what I suggest. No time, no money, no understanding of how it would all work.

So Monday night I decided to take my own advice and build my own e-commerce store. I really can't be mad at the people that make excuses if I'm not following my own advice, right?

So I built it 80% of the way, took about 3 hours. Yesterday I spent another couple of hours learning a few things about the tools I'm using. Today and tomorrow I will put the finishing touches and soft launch. Wish me luck.

In case you want to do something like this, these are some of the tools and services I used to put it together.

• WordPress, self-hosted by Greengeeks.
• eCommerce by Woocommerce (free).
• Kadence theme (free, but I have the paid version).
• SEO with Rankmath (free)
• Graphics, made by me with Photoshop and Canva.
• Printify & Printful to print and fulfill merchandise.
• Paypal & Stripe for payment processing (both free).

As you can see, most of this is free or inexpensive. I believe you could start this with almost zero up-front costs.

Stay tuned, and let me know if you'd like to know something more specific about launching your own e-commerce store.

The post eCommerce, here I go. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I've covered some ways to avoid and be on the lookout for online scams. A year or so ago I made a video on how to spot a Facebook profile scammer. More recently I did another video updating some information about how to spot a scammer on most social networks.

But I've been meaning to cover SMS or TXT scams as well and I just received one that I wanted to share with you.

Before I show you the screenshots and explain what to look for, keep in mind that anybody can be a target. You don't have to have money or need money. You can be married or single, you can live with your parents or on your own. Everybody can be a target so you should never let your guard down.

NEVER click on a link you didn't ask for or were not expecting until you are absolutely certain that the link is harmless. Better yet, just don't click on it.

When the Covid-19 lockdown started to take place throughout various cities and states, people started receiving a text saying that they had been in contact with someone that was infected and that they should take certain action. Some said to go to a website to confirm, others said to call a number, and I'm sure there were other "calls to action."

That's an opportunistic scam and it prays on your fear. It may seem legitimate, it can even come from what appears to be a legitimate number like the one I am showing you below.

What's the likelihood the SMS is legitimate?

First, I knew right away that it was an attempt to scam me in some way or another. I have never dealt with or have any connections to the Audubon Society. That was red flag number one.

Besides that, two other things stood out. There are multiple recipients in the text, and the URL looks suspsicious. Can you see what's suspicious about it?

Let's have a closer look.

Does the link check out?

Notice there are 3 phone numbers in the group; I blurred 2 of them because they could be other private citizens. 1 is the sender, and there are 2 other ones. I'm technically the fourth recipient.

I'll get back to the sender's phone number in a moment. But first let's take a closer look at the link included in the message. Did you spot the problem with the link?

It takes a little bit of practice to spot the problem. So if you haven't noticed, there are a few, problems with this message, here they are.

First, the URL does not use "https." Nowadays any serious website should be using SSL which means the URL would start with https. Then the link doesn't actually say "facebook," it says "facebok." But then you'll notice that the ".com" part comes after a strange name, NOT facebook. This is NOT facebook.com

The domain is actually "com82759321.com" And they just added "facebok" at the beginning as a sub-domain.

This is kind of clever and it would fool a lot of people; it could even trap someone that is distracted and just clicks on things before realizing that they just clicked on a bad link.

This is why you NEVER click on a link you didn't ask for or were not expecting until you are absolutely certain that the link is harmless. Better yet, just don't click on it.

Back to those multiple recipients

So I mentioned there were other recipients besides me.

Multiple recipients in a text is the other red flag in this scam. I don't know if this was deliberate or just a mistake on the scammers part.

But if you were receiving a legitimate sms alert it would only be sent to you and not other people. Banks, doctors, websites and apps don't send unsolicited group texts to notify you about profile or account issues, that is most likely a scam.

Banks, doctors, websites and apps don't send unsolicited group texts to notify you about profile or account issues, that is most likely a scam.

This was good. Close to perfect

The last part of this scam is the phone number from the sender. The scammer needs to make this be realisitc. 

One way is to just transpose one number that you might recognize in hopes that you won't notice the mistake. 

But in this particular case, the sender's number is actually legitimate. When I googled the number, it came up as being part of the the Orange County chapter of the National Audubon Society.

Maybe the scammer got a hold of this phone number because it's listed online, or just thougth it would make his attempt at scamming someone more difficult to spot because it's in the same area code as me.

So this was good, but fortunately I've seen similar scams hundreds of times so I could spot it easily. Do you feel like you could spot a scam if you get one?

avoiding sMS/txt scams Summary

Just like avoiding any other type of scam, the key to avoiding SMS scams is to remain vigilant, and keep your guard up when interacting with strangers. Especially if the interaction was initiated by someone else.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Was I expecting this notification? If not, then it's probably a scam.
• Do I recognize the number? If not, it could be a scam.
• If I don't recognize the number, is it a legitimate number? Even if it's a real number, it could be a scam.
• Are they asking me to click on a bogus link? DO NOT click on unsolicited links.
• Did they request personal information? DO NOT send personal information, even better, do not reply.

I hope this helps you spot fake SMS messages that are trying to take advantage of you. 

The post Avoid Falling for TXT and SMS Scams appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP

This is known as the "LAMP stack" over time, the LAMP stack has sprouted many variations of it.

With the explosion of web programming languages, sometimes the acronym may fit other definitions.

Theoretically speaking, I like the definition from Wikipedia where they refer to it as an archetype. The model of the LAMP stack is clear and easy to replicate and communicate.

For example:

If you have the technical ability or hard-set requirement, Linux can be replaced with Windows. Apache can be replaced with IIS, or Tomcat, or NGINX or Litespeed. MySQL can be replaced with Postgress or Microsoft SQL Server. Some applications may use Python instead of PHP.

So while the L.A.M.P. stack usually refers to the classic Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, in some cases it is used only to quickly present the basic requirements that a specific program may need.

In more specific discussions, there are other acronyms that have established themselves as well, like WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP), MAMP (Mac OS, Apache, MySQL, PHP), or LEMP and a few other ones.

Examples of LAMP applications:

• WordPress
• PHPBB
• Joomla
• Vanilla forums
• Easy!Appointments
• Hundreds more...

A big portion of the applications you'll find available in your cPanel or Softaculous installation scripts are LAMP applications.

If you need to install a LAMP application, I suggest you consider using Inmotion Hosting to host it for you. They're affordable, 100% USA based, small business and if you use my link I'll get a small commission and you'll save up to 50% from your invoice.

The post What’s a L.A.M.P. Application? Or What’s the LAMP Stack? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

In all seriousness, sometimes I see writing that is appalling. Heck, sometimes I see my own past writing and it's worthy of major cringe.

So what can we do about it? For decades I've used the spell check in Word, and then Google, and the built-in spell checker with Firefox and other browsers, but it's never enough.

Word introduced a grammar checker, I think with Office 2000, maybe before. I could be completely wrong, but I remember giving a class for MS Word in which I talked about this feature and that was for Office 2000, so it has been a while.

There have been a number of contextual grammar checkers over time, but they never really work well.

A few years ago I discovered Grammarly. This is by far, the best spell checker and grammar checker available on the market today.

Unfortunately, it's only for English. I wish there was something like this for Spanish as well, but I don't think there is. Perhaps I haven't looked for it yet.

I Love Grammarly. I just got an email from them and I thought I'd write about it because it is a perfect example of why I keep the subscription active.

The newest feature introduced by Grammarly is "Tone Detector." They already have contextual choices when you write, to help you determine if you're writing casually or formally, or if your audience is general or technical and stuff like that. You can check out Grammarly here.

But now they took it up one level by adding a way to determine if your email may come across as aggressive, or confident or defensive. This gives you a chance to revise your words and maybe use a different, what do you call it... tone?

Here's a video I made about the new update. Enjoy

The post How to Write More Gooder With this Brow sir Extenshion appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But in the process of cleaning up older files, I decided to revisit my workflow which could use improvement. I try to keep my footage and photos organized by date. But if I do this manually, then sometimes I don't do it right away and then I have to rush to clear my SD cards so I can reuse them. This leads to random folders with titles like "review later" or "up to august 8 2019.

I decided to write a script to help me sort out the files automatically so I could eliminate the human element. But then I thought, someone, must have done this already. There's no way that I am the only one that needs this type of solution

And I was right. After scouring forums and blog posts talking about how to automatically sort files and folders, I found the winning solution.

TL;DR

If you are a little technical, the script is below. It's short and simple. Just adjust the date format, the destination and the source directories and it should just work. But if you are not technical or familiar with running terminal commands, I explain it in detail below.

I found a promising blog post here, by Mike Beach and that in turn sent me to Github to get his script, but at the very end of the Github page, Mike mentioned a tool named ExifTool by Phil Harvey.

He was also gracious enough to add a 1 line, quick script to make ExifTool do exactly what I wanted. Here's the script, I'll break it down in a moment:

exiftool "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" -d "%Y/%Y-%m-%d" $DIR

Getting the script

If you want to get this working on OSX, I think the easiest way to get it installed is to use Homebrew.

If you don't already have Homebrew, get it installed and then you'll have access to ExifTool and tons of other tools and utilities that come in handy as well, like the amazing youtube-dl script; more on that later.

Once you have Homebrew installed, just run this command on your Terminal to get ExifTool installed:

brew install exiftool

After a few moments, ExifTool will be installed and available in your system.

How to use the script

Now let's break down the script so you know how to use it.

exiftool "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" -d "%Y/%Y-%m-%d" $DIR

The first word, exiftool simply calls the utility. You can just type that into your terminal, hit return and it will show you instructions on how to use it.

Next is the "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" part this tells it to create a directory using the date and time based on the EXIF data of the photo or video.

The next part is the flag -d. This tells the script that we want to specify the date format we want to use to create the directory. Next, we define what structure of the folders should be by defining the date format: "%Y/%Y-%m-%d". If you notice, there are two instances of the year variable, separated by a slash.

This means that a folder with the year will be created, and inside of that, a folder with the year, month and day will be created. Then the files that match will be moved into that folder.

If you wanted to modify this, you just re-arrange the variables any way it suits your needs. I prefer to use this format YYYY-MM-DD so the script is already set to do that.

The very last part, the $DIR is just a placeholder to tell exiftool where the photos and videos you want to sort exist currently. This is my actual script:

exiftool "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" -d "/Volumes/ScreenFTB/footage/%Y/%Y-%m-%d" ./

The last part that I changed from $DIR to ./ means I need to be in the same folder as the files I want to sort out. It's also worth noting that I added /Volumes/ScreenFTB/footage/ to the date formatting part, that specifies that I want the folder structure to be created on the drive called "ScreenFTB" under the folder footage.

One caveat

This one line script is amazing. The only issue I found so far is that videos taken with my Samsung Note 9 don't seem to have any EXIF data so it won't work with those files. For those instances where I use my phone to collect footage, I guess I'll have to sort them by hand or will have to find or write a script that uses the file naming structure of the files.

In conclusion

This script will save tons of time in sorting out files and making your workflow a little faster. I'm grateful for open source and Phil Harvey. It seems he's been maintaining this since 2003!

The post How To Sort Your Pictures and Videos Quickly appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Today, I'll be lucky if I go out for a single event and come back home with less than 30GB of video footage for my next video.

To give you an idea, My Taste of Huntington Beach footage came out to about 50GB, if I recall correctly, the video I shot for Andrei's during their July promotion was about 35GB. A lunch review, like the American Grub one, may take up 8-20GB.

It's undeniable that this is a trend that will not stop anytime soon. For the most part, when I create a new video for Youtube, I archive the raw footage and after a few months, I just delete it.

Unfortunately, video files are notoriously difficult to compress without loss of quality.

I know some people keep all the footage, indefinitely. If I did that, I'd have over 50 terabytes of data just hanging around.

Imagine those people that are shooting daily vlogs at 4K. WOW, they are probably in the hundreds of terabytes range per year. I don't envy them at all.

So I think deleting the raw stuff is fine for now.

However, there are cases where I think the raw video should be kept around for a while. For example this video I published recently: Beth Jacob Congregation of Irvine Vandalized - City of Irvine Press Conference.

I think it has more value than just publishing it for Youtube. A company may want to license it, or I may want to do a follow-up and re-use some of the footage. Who knows.

I decided to explore compressing all the files and archiving them. But unfortunately, this doesn't do much. I thought you may be in a similar situation and this will help you decide if you should even explore it.

Good ol' gz and tar.

I thought I would use a tar.gz file to get the most compression. I did a little research and came up with this command as the one that would achieve the highest level of compression:

$ env GZIP=-9 tar -cvzf /file-directory/

This makes tar, compress the files using the -9 level which is the highest available.

I also know there are some other programs that can do slightly better compression, but they aren't reliable and require special software installations.

I wanted to make my method be long-lasting and somewhat universal. It just requires that your computer can run basic tar and gz commands.

Universal and long term access.

OSX can do this easily, you can also use Windows for this by setting it up with Cygwin or some of the newer methods, and of course, Linux does this natively.

But in the end results were disappointing.

Here's what happened. I had a directory with 12.78 GB of data in it. At the end of the compression, the result was 12.33 GB hardly any space savings.

The only benefit I see to doing this now is to maintain a clean archive of the files I have used to make vlogs. I might do it just for that reason, the 3-5% space savings is almost irrelevant.

Storage is cheap so maybe that's the real way to keep files around for a while.

In Conclusion and TL;DR

The takeaway I think is that unless a new, universal, and long-lasting method to compress video comes around, the only real benefit to doing this is to wrap up everything into one single file and then archive it; there are no real space savings with this method.

The post Compressing and Archiving Video Files. Is It Worth the Trouble for Vloggers? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

He wanted to know if there was a way to share an Excel spreadsheet so both could work at the same time without disrupting each other's work, and without having to email it to each other or dealing with accessing it from a shared hard drive.

He didn't want to have to email it to each other whenever they made a change. That is just a nightmare and so 2002.

I was a bit taken aback because I thought everybody knew about the solution for this by now. But apparently I was wrong, I told him I had the solution for this, but I still wanted to hear his requirements. I think this answer might help you as well.

I listened to all the requirements he told me. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing anything and he didn't need anything too robust like a proper MySQL or NoSQL database. He didn't; he's in real estate and just needed to track stats and properties related to the business.

He wanted something just like his Excel spreadsheet, but better.

The clear-cut answer was to move the Excel spreadsheet to Google Sheets. Google Sheets is part of the Google Docs suite and it does most (arguably, everything) you need to do with Excel, and it does it better.

But can I run some formulas if I need to? He asked...

Of course, you can run formulas. Complex ones, simple ones and if you have the chops or have some patience doing some web searches, you can even program very fancy scripts.

For example, there is the Content Strategy Helper worksheet by Builtvisible. Where you can plug in a search query and it will do a bunch of magic for you to enhance your research and SEO. To use it, you go to the Google spreadsheet they have, you make a copy to your own Google docs and you can start using it.

Another much simpler example is one spreadsheet I use where each of the sheets has a list of locations where my articles or videos might be shared. Each sheet contains network locations, for example: Facebook groups or facebook pages, Google+ profiles and groups, Twitter, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, things like that.

Then I have one more sheet where I use a simple formula to bring all those locations from each sheet into one new column in a document. I use this as an activity log to make sure I have shared my content out for maximum exposure. Think of it like a checklist for promotional purposes.

I have seen complex financial models, simple budgets, and all sorts of things done with Google Sheets. Sheets become even more powerful when you realize that they usually play nice with other Google tools, like Google maps, Google Documents (like Word). And you can also create forms to capture data that goes directly into the spreadsheets. Think surveys, questionnaires, RSVPs, etc.

Needless to say, my friend was happy with the answer because he didn't realize that you could share a spreadsheet in real time with other users and that it would all be backed up in real time, safely and securely.

My buddy also didn't know that you could run formulas as complex as you can in Excel, you can run charts, reports and more.

I have been using Google Docs since they came out. I have my reservations about Google's use of their political and economic power, but their products are unparalleled.

I don't know why many people think that Google Sheets is not as powerful as Excel. Maybe it's just the group of diehard Excel users that have been using it for their entire career and somehow think that Google sheets "just can't do that."

From having to use both and from having to teach people to use both and support both, I can tell you that Google sheets is as powerful and capable --if not more-- than Excel.

If you want to use it for a business and get support and a few more security features, you just need to get a G Suite account, previously known as Google for Business, here's a link to a free trial.

But if you just want to use it for yourself and a couple of business partners, family or friends, then you just need to go to your Google Drive when you log in to your Gmail account. You do know you have a free amount of storage with Google Drive included with your Gmail account... right?

The post If You Want Excel Spreadsheets but Need Something Better appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

He said it was the best tip he's gotten all month, so I thought I pass it on to you as well.Sometimes you press the little X on a browser tab too fast and you close your browser tab. But you did it accidentally, and now you want it back. Maybe it was an accident, but you NEED it back, that long form you have been filling out is there, fifteen minutes of typing gone!

Sometimes you press the little close button (x) on a browser tab too fast and you close your browser tab. But you did it accidentally, and now you want it back. Maybe it was an accident, but you NEED it back, that long form you have been filling out is there, fifteen minutes of typing gone!

Not so fast, if this happens to you again, pause for a second, then remember that this keyboard combination will re-open the last tab you closed. If you press the combination several times, each time you do it, the next last-closed tab will re-open up.

It's like undo for closing a tab. Works on all major browsers on your desktop.

This is very useful every once in a while, or if you are like me, you are close-tab-happy with the "command + W" keyboard shortcut to make the current tab close.

The shortcut to re-open the tab is shift+command+t on OSX or shift+control+t on Windows. Just press those keys in a combination sequence and your tab should re-open. In some cases, it will even have a partially filled out form, like a blog post or a survey.

This works on all major browsers, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera. If you are on a mobile device, when you close a tab, the browser usually prompts you to "undo" briefly at the bottom of the screen.

The post How to Reopen a Browser Tab You Closed? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I have worked with hundreds of people over the past few years. In the process of building a sales funnel, or a website or working on their email marketing, I get access to their usernames and passwords.

And I see a problem that has been happening since 1999 when I first worked on a client account. Chances are this applies to you at least to some degree.
Back in 2005 my identity was stolen. It wasn't stolen digitally, but the process of recovering it and cleaning it up sucked. And it sucked up a big portion out of 3+ years of my life with weekly and monthly calls with police and creditors and debtors and all that fun stuff.
10 years later, now everybody that does anything online faces the same risk of identity theft. Please take this seriously and read on...

First of all, when you are working with a 3rd party, you must change your usernames and passwords for all accounts that were shared as soon as that assignment or engagement is over. That includes, developers, designers, "wordpress pople," "seo people," or whoever.

So if your developer finishes your website and gives it to you on Monday, the 1st of the month, then before that day is over, you should have already changed all the usernames and passwords related to that project.

Unless of course the developer will continue working or accessing the site for additional work, but that should go unsaid.

You should change all the passwords, not because you're afraid of your developer or wordpress person or whoever it may be, but because you want to make sure you're protected. You don't know if their systems are secure.

What if you shared the username and password with them via email, or chat, or skype, and someone is snooping around their computer? Now your security is at risk!

This is not a big problem if you just share one account. Maybe it's just the Aweber account or your cPanel account. You think it's not a big deal, that's just the email list account.

But it could be a really big problem and let me explain why.

Don't share passwords with other accounts!

Now that I told you to change passwords after anyone else besides you works on your accounts, the next thing you need to do is make sure your passwords are unique to each account.

So what if someone finds out that your Aweber password is "snoopy123"? Who cares, you think?

By the way, that is an actual password someone I worked with was using (for all their accounts). Well, most people that use weak passwords, also tend to use one password, or a few different passwords for ALL their accounts.

That's the other big problem. You should not do share passwords with multiple accounts. The reason should become obvious really soon --if it wasn't already.

Here's the setting:

The post Keeping your Online Activities Safe appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you have LastPass Premium, and a late model Android then you have a featured called App Fill. With app fill, LastPass will autofill in your usernames and passwords when you try to login to an app like Twitter, or Instagram, or Netflix, or whatever.

This is similar to how LastPass works on the browser, except it works with your mobile apps on Android.

But sometimes we goof it up or we have fat fingers and It seems that Lastpass autofill is broken.

If you don't have the app fill option and you always have to copy and paste your username and password, I recommend you get LastPass Premium which is only $12 per year. You get tougher security like two-factor authentication and mobile integration amongst other things.

At one point when switching between Instagram accounts I accidentally told LastPass NOT to prompt me anymore. This meant that whenever I logged out of Instagram I would have to manually go and find my password for the other account I wanted to use.

This is a major PITA and it defeats the whole purpose of using LastPass. If you find yourself in the same boat as I did, then this is how you fix it.

Re-Associate LastPass app fill with your app

Here is how you can associate LastPass with an app after you accidentally or deliberately told Lastpass not to prompt you.

1. Open up LastPass, and on the top left corner click on the menu slider. I can't show you screenshots of everything because LastPass doesn't allow screenshots of any of its screens.
2. Once you open that up, at the bottom you'll see the cogwheel icon and settings menu, click on that.
3. The 3rd option down the list is labeled "App Fill," click on that.
4. Then look for the option to "Edit app fill settings" and click on that.
5. Search for the app you want to associate with LastPass, in my case, it was Instagram.
6. Click on the app, then you will see two boxes. To add the association make sure "Show fill helper" is checked, then click ok.

After you do this and you get back to your app, LastPass should come up at the login screen and try to help you fill in username and password. No more copying and pasting.

The post How To Fix Autofill on LastPass Mobile appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I use it and it works great. Once you sign up, you can establish an hourly rate and start promoting your profile as an expert so that people pay you for advice.

This is a great way to make additional income without having to spend a lot of effort doing it. Simply help another professional, or entrepreneur with a challenge.

Sometimes 15 minutes is all that people need, sometimes a full hour is necessary.

If you join, and you have a WordPress website then you can add an interactive widget that allows people to book you through Clarity with just a couple of clicks.

You just copy the text provided by the Clarity website and paste it into a text widget in your own WordPress website. The video below explains it all.

The post How to Add a Clarity Widget to Your Blog appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Would you use it?

I might. It actually seems pretty cool. The video explains it all. The way it got funded was through an Indie Go Go campaign.

They received 2% more than their goal so if you visit their website now, you'll notice that EvaDrop Smart Shower is in pre-order status right now.

The EvaDrop website shows that the estimated deliver time is for December 2015. Not sure if that means they'll ship in time for Christmas. You have to go start the pre-order process to see this notice.

I didn't continue with the order because they ask too much information up front. I just wanted to see the pricing. I think price is just over $100.00. I'll update you when I find out.

But they're just around the corner in a neighboring city so I could pay them a visit and get more info. That would be neat.

Since we have a drought here in California, this would be ideal to be available right now. I guess we'll wait and see if they're able to deliver on time.

The post Want To Save 3 Billion Gallons of Water? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

They can cost quite a bit if you hire a professional service but you may or may not need such an fee for your next event. This is how you can save between $300 and $1000 or more!

Our friends threw a party for their daughter and check out what I found. Not only did I make a new YouTube Friend, but I also learned an inexpensive way of creating a photobooth for your next event.

The cool thing about this is that all the components are interchangeable so you can go low-budget or high budget.

You could have a high-end camera using the eye-fi card and sending to a nice photo printer. The options are many, the combinations unlimited.

This setup uses a Selphy CP900 wireless printer, a simple Microsoft webcam and an app to run the photobooth functions like photo grids, or fun effects.

The post DIY Wireless Photobooth with Printer [Video] appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Here are some screencaptures I made with a little bit of commentary for those of you that didn't get to try it out.

Aardvark in chat referral system Aardvark Fails to be funny aadvark-doesnt-get-thank-you

The post Another one bites the dust — Google putting Aadvark to rest appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I first used a Blackberry back in 1999, it was the 850 model. And back then, damn it was cool. You still had to carry around a phone... the blackberry was strictly e-mail or you could also add paging capabilities. It was an oversized pager with e-mail. But e-mail in real time, and you could reply, and synchronize to your computer. Best of all, it worked.

Over the next few years I managed a fleet of about 250 of these devices for a company at one point. Since this was a company tool, I got to test out the new ones all the time and I had the latest. You know I had to because I needed to support them.

It was a breeze maintaining them. Especially considering the other ugly alternatives at the time, --all things considered, RIM & their Blackberry were awesome.

That was 1999, now fast forward to 3 years ago, the "pda" market was pretty much defined by Blackberry, maybe a little bit of Palm, but mostly Blackberry; especially on the enterprise.

Anytime anyone asked me or advice in regards to a do-it-all device, I would recommend the latest blackberry. I had it. I went from model to model up to my beloved Curve which I bought last summer.

Then the iPhone came out, and it pretty much earned a top spot in innovation and design. In usual Apple style, the launch of iPhone and the iPod touch opened a whole new market. Quietly Apple also became a top player on cell phone devices as well. See what they do? Those sneaky bastards!

They make a new product, which develops a whole chain of new markets to support it, enhance it, and ultimately profit from it, but at the same time they enter already established markets and quickly take a significant slice of the pie. That's why they're genius.

Six months ago, hell, six weeks ago I would still think to myself how the Blackberry "can do that too" or "pssst, blackberry has been doing that for years... zzzz" in response to blurbs I would read online about how great the iPhone is, or I would hear someone rave about the latest update during the usual water cooler conversations at the office, or Starbucks, or Wahoos, or on the radio, or on the web, seriously WTF! Something was up with all this buzz about the iPhone.

Seriously, the blackberry Curve, is probably one of the best phones ever made. It works, it kicks ass and I know it inside out and can make it do great things, why would I need an iPhone?

Then the iPhone 3G came out, and as their commercials says now... "This is going to change everything" it began changing everything. I still didn't buy in, I thought, whatever.

Blackberry has Thunder (that name deserves its own discussion!) coming out and all this "new" stuff is in the works; due out soon. Surely they will have a great answer to the iPhone. But the new blackberry isn't due out just yet, and Apple has now taken the mobile device world by storm.

One day, a few weeks ago my blackberry began having problems. It would go into this SOS mode and not receive or send anything. I tried it all, the usual backup, wipe, reload, start over. I went to the store, no help. Called support, they sent a new SIM card; same problem.

After a long bike ride a few weeks later, I thought I had lost my phone, I must have dropped it. The following day during lunch, I decided to go and buy a new one. So I did, I went out and bought a new phone, I got a new iPhone, shinny 16GB of pure awesomeness in a little tiny box.

The contents of the box, simple as usual, a power "lego", a usb cable, the phone and the headphones.

I couldn't be happier about my phone now. Like I said earlier, I almost feel bad that I no longer use the crackberry. If you're a hardcore Blackberry fan, as I once was, trust me the iPhone is worth a look.

It does all that the Blackberry did, and it does it better, faster and more elegantly. The one thing that is a shortcoming is the battery life. If you're a heavy user and keep the 3G constantly on, the battery will not last very long. seriously.

The iPhone is not quite ready for the enterprise for this one reason. The need to charge it so often. This prevents any true road warrior from being able to ditch the trustworthy 2+ days of Blackberry battery life.

Otherwise, you have it all... GPS, camera, a full Qwerty keyboard, in which I can now type as fast if not faster on it than I did on my Curve. Over the air sync for calendar and contacts. Enterprise e-mail, your personal e-mail, the list goes on. Not to mention the full universe of apps available out there.

Trust me, they nailed their current marketing campaign. "this is going to change everything." It will. I highly recommend that you take a look at this phone, its not just a phone though.

The post Hasta la Vista Blackberry. It’s been good. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I just downloaded, installed a new addon. It is going on my list of required extensions pretty much permanently. PicLens is the name, and it gives a really cool effect to websites like Flickr, Youtube, and other media rich sites.

I wanted to wait a bit longer to try it out some more, and to take some nice screenshots to show you but oh well. You gotta try it if you are a regular Flickr user. I think its founded on the notion that we are looking for visual stimuli much more than just text.

It displays all the video and picture content from a website on a really attractive "wall" where you can zoom in and out and view the stuff. video after the jump.

You can use it on a bunch of sites, and hopefully they'll keep adding new ones all the time. You can also add support to your own site so the plugin works well with it. You simply have to add a media RSS feed.

Here's a short video put out by the producers of PicLens that gives you a broad overview of the great things PicLens has to offer. While you're at it, don't forget to get the new Firefox 3. Piclens by Cooliris.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utySPFH_HlA

update: added links to FF3 and Cooliris.

The post Eye candy for the Web appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

It may not be full of fancy features but it did the trick of converting a PDF file into a Word document for me. So it was worth every penny that I didn't pay. I highly recommend adding this to your favorites for future reference.

So you go to their site, you browse to your local system to find the file you want to convert. You then select the type of file you want it converted to and specify an e-mail address that will receive the link to download the newly converted file. Pretty nifty if you ask me. Check it out!

Zamzar - Free online file conversion

5 min later edit...

Wow, it even does media files. Granted there is a 100 mb limit but if you don't need more than that then this is great for that too.

The post Free File Conversion Website. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.