Mass Communications

Digital Media

Digital media gives you the ability to burn cd’s and create your music mixes just. You can upload your photos and fix red eye in pictures, or crop and edit them. You can utilize digital media to burn and edit your dvd’s as well.

Plus most digital media software suites that you purchase will also allow you to share your media within their won online communities.

A digital media suite of products all in one package can range in prices from $80.00 and up. And if you are really doing a lot with different types of media than purchasing one of these software programs like Nero, Roxio or Cyberlink digital media suites might be a good investment for you to make.

But if you really just need to be able to burn a cd or crop and fix red eye in a photo you really do not need to spend the extra money. Your windows computer software probably already includes those capabilities within it. If you do not have an updated windows program there are many free software programs you can find online that you can download and use for free.

In fact at cnet.com you will find a large selection of free to use software that is easy to download and install on your computer.

So before making a big investment you might want to look at your windows system first before you buy and you just might find you already have the accessories in your system that will meet your everyday needs or you will be able to get them online for free.

Filed Under: Internet, Multi-Media Tagged With: Digital media, Nero, Roxio

Socializing and Entertainment Online

The Internet has evolved tremendously from where it first began decades ago. Billions of users log on worldwide—each one engaging in any number tasks from checking email and uploading photographs to deciding on a new restaurant. Many of these users enjoy using their computer to unwind.

A great number of users log on each day to play their favorite online game. Players try their hand at building simulated cites or test their luck on their favorite online casino site. With the amount of people playing these types of games regularly, it’s easy to see that a large percentage of users enjoy this outlet. Playing a hand of poker or blackjack is fun. However, you can engage in more than the usual online games and still find a way to be entertained.

Socializing online has seen a great increase of use over the years. Many email accounts allow for chatting to take place while you check your inbox. Chatting is a great way to meet new people with similar interests. Find a site to share your photos. Join a site that complements your interests or prompts you to learn something new. Instant messaging provides a way for people to communicate no matter how far the distance is between them. Video chat through sites like Skype add the extra touch of seeing your loved ones as you chat.

Additional leisure activities online include turning your computer into a mini-home theater system. More people are logging on to watch movies or television online. Sites such as Netflix gives registered users access to a library of various movies and television show to watch on their computer.

Filed Under: Internet, Privacy/Security Tagged With: Entertainment, online casino, Socializing

Spreadsheets for Home and Business Users

A software type that is used by many businesses and individuals worldwide is the spreadsheet. Spreadsheet programs have many uses for business and for the average household consumer as well. Many companies handle all or most of their accounting directly from a spreadsheet. Many of the most used types of accounting forms can be downloaded for use in Microsoft Excel.

Microsoft Excel is the most popular of the current spreadsheet programs. It comes installed on many computers and is a part of the extremely popular Microsoft Office suite of programs. Excel has had several different versions throughout the years. Currently, the most popular version is Excel 2007, which comes with Microsoft Office 2007. A new version launched in 2010 with Windows 7, but it has not made its way into the business world yet.

Many casual computer users don’t know all of the functions a spreadsheet can provide. In addition to providing a way to organize numbers and information, the spreadsheet can perform mathematical calculations on the data that is entered. Another function that many spreadsheets offer is the ability to make charts, graphs, and other graphical representations of the data.

Modern spreadsheets also have many of the functions that word processors do. The user can change the attributes of the text within the spreadsheet by choosing a font, changing the size, and formatting the centering. A spreadsheet can be edited to be as simple or as detailed as the user desires.

For those who use Microsoft Excel, a benefit available is the ability to transfer information from the spreadsheets directly into other Microsoft office products. It can be very useful for those who have to create presentations for work to be able to use a form or chart from Microsoft Excel within a presentation on Microsoft PowerPoint. Functions like this will likely grow through the years to become even more intuitive and useful.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Business, Computer program

Opening Pandora: How a Troubled Startup Turned Into a Corporate Giant

Opening “Pandora’s Box” has always been considered a no-no, derived from ancient Greek mythology. That might all change all because of one little internet company turned massive Prometheus player in the Olympus-like internet world. Even Zeus would quiver in his own thundercloud.

The name of that company is none other than “Pandora”, essentially an experiment in the ‘music genome’ as they call it. The officials and hardworking members of Pandora are a testament to hard work and persevering through the troubled times of the music industry for the past eleven years.

The fact is music dealt with piracy and a transition in how media is used–from CD to MP3, AM and FM to Sirius and XM (and even at that time, Sirius and XM bickered over satellite space and quality). When Pandora came around, the waves were already pretty tumultuous. Why would anyone be interested in their little idea–allowing users to create their own radio station based off of one music artist and then filtering other artists with similar sounds. It’s essentially customizing a radio station for someone–sort of.

Apparently, it caught on–after some time, though. Pandora now has 75 million registered users! Obviously, its free service was a selling point. Simply register online and begin creating your very own radio stations. It took internet radio to the next level–customization. You were no longer at the mercy of what the service played. You decided what to play. And that was, for sure, the hidden benefit. The trick was getting it to catch on with users in a bloated industry inundated with MP3 sharing, stealing, buying, copying, ripping, and constant burning on your desktop media player.

Nice job, Tim Westergren, the very thankful CEO of Pandora. It took a lot to make a little startup hit it big. But it was all worth it.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Business

File Sharing Information

The process of providing or distributing access to information that is digitally stored such as electronic books, documents, and multi media, is called file sharing. It can be applied through a variety of ways such as distributions models, transmission, and storage by the use of distributed peer-to-peer networking, hyperlinked documents that are Internet based, computer file server installations that are centralized on computer networks, and removable media.

There is software that can be used to connect into peer-to-peer networks in order to look for files that are shared on the computer of other users that have connections to the network. These files are then directly downloaded from other computer users that are on the network. Usually big files are broken into smaller ones which can be attained from numerous peers. Then the downloader can reassemble them. This happens at the time the peer uploads the chunks it has already taken from other peers.

An easy change from peer-to-peer software is what is known as File hosting services. These services are often used with internet tools such as blogs, forums, email, or additional medium that have links that are to direct downloads from the file hosting site to be embedded.

There are different types of file sharing that goes on in research and academic venues in which researchers have a desire to access books and subscription journals, but do not want to pay license fees. With file sharing websites, researchers are allowed to request articles that are found by those not having access to them. These articles are then put on the website for all to have access to them. This is a practice that is typically unknown to a lot of journal editors. There are also some researchers that use file sharing to share library access codes so additional researchers can have access to a library’s’ database.

Filed Under: File Sharing Tagged With: File Sharing

Find & Replace – A Handy Feature in Windows Word

One of the most popular features of Microsoft Word is the feature that allows you to search for something, and then replace it. It allows you to easily as well as quickly change all of the instances of a phrase or a word to something different. It also allows you to replace special characters, formatting or even those blank spaces if you want. You can quickly open this great feature without leaving the keyboard by pressing F5, Alt and P at the same time or Ctrl H.

It’s handy for a lot more than just replacing phrases or words. Some people still tap their spacebar twice after a period. Instead of trying to remember to do this all the time, they can simply change the doubles to single spaces through this feature. Simply put the two spaces in the field to search and then one space in the replace field, then hit replace all.

If you want to get rid of special characters, such as those line breaks that are manual, tabs, or paragraph break? This can be accomplished with this feature as well. Simply click “More” in the dialog box and when it expands, click on the special option and then simply choose the character that’s going to be replaced. Now you’ll replace it with nothing. This will be done with going to the field for replacing and pressing your delete button to make sure that the box is empty. You can do find next if you want to do it manually or you can replace them all to get rid of the characters.

Anyone who uses Word a lot knows how useful this feature is finding things that are wrong with the document and changing them, quickly and easily. Instead of looking through the document manually, all you have to do is to put in what you want changed and what you want it changed to. The program does it for you.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Computer program, Microsoft Windows

Little Known Risks of Illegally Downloading

File sharing can be a good thing, if you’re sharing something of your own creation, such as artwork you’d like others to see or a funny family moment. File sharing of copyrighted works, musical, artistic, literary, or otherwise, is illegal, but the practice is running rampant across the Internet. While users can be fined for downloading illegally, most think that they will never get caught. However, there are other risks to illegal downloads and file sharing that computer users may not be aware of.

Some networks that offer open file sharing are somewhat sneaky. Once you sign up and become a member, some websites will lay siege to part of your hard drive and transmit files without your knowledge to other members across the globe. This means that all your files can be accessed.

If your security settings are lax, your banking information, credit card accounts, and other private files become accessible to any one of the thousand members of such a site. File sharing and downloading from unfamiliar sources can also lead to an increased threat of viruses, Trojan horses, and other malicious software. It’s like leaving the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition of your Escalade at a ghetto convenience store.

Most techies assume that since downloads weren’t used for financial gain, they’re in the clear from copyright infringement. Not so. It is illegal to download or upload copyrighted material without permission from the creator. Slaps on the wrist aren’t an option for first time offenders either. Fines of up to $250,000 accompanied by five years in prison are the penalties for first timers. Minors aren’t safe because they’re young. A minor could see her criminal charges and punishment extended to parents or guardians. Several websites exist where legal downloads are available. Napster, iTunes, and Yahoo Music offer files for a fee.

Play it safe and don’t file share unless you know it’s legal and uses a trusted source.

Filed Under: Downloads Tagged With: Download

Technology, Property, the Pirate Party

If you follow the news and you’re interested in digital rights management, you’re probably at least a little familiar with the site Pirate Bay. It’s so popular that it has its own abbreviation – “TPB” as it’s called – Pirate Bay is one of the most popular websites in the world. It bills itself as “the most resiliant bittorrent site.” Based in Sweden, it has more than four million registered users, despite the fact that one need not register to use the site.

Sweden seems to be something of a hotbed of pro-piracy sentiment, despite recent injunctions that have taken TPB down for brief periods of time. Besides TPB, there’s a Pirate Bay NGO, and the Pirate Party – a political party, not directly related to the other two groups but dedicated to promoting the same ideas – that took two Parliamentary seats in 2009 elections. Using Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes, members of the Pirate party argue that free replication of ideas is inherently within the nature of modern technology – even dating back to the printing press, but accelerating as the ease of replicating information increases. The idea that a true marketplace of ideas ought not be directed by who has the dollars to pay for those ideas – and perhaps more importantly, that this is inherently facilitated by modern peer to peer filesharing technology – isn’t a concept Americans would think of for build around a political party.

Of course, Americans might be swayed by a more capitalist argument. Specifically, American piracy advocates are more likely to point out that large expenditures are only necessary to make and distribute music if one is not able to rely on the quality of the music to advertise itself. They would also point out that the fans of that pirated music are extremely likely to support the artists they like by spending money on concerts, merchandise, and the occasional legal download. As digital media gets higher in quality and lower in price to produce, this argument becomes increasingly valid.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Piracy, Virtual Property

Best Programs for Storing and Editing Photos

The digital camera and popularity of camera phones have changed the way we take and store photographs forever. Photo albums have gone digital but how can you make sure that the images are saved forever and preserved? There are several excellent software programs which will help you organize your digital images and most come with advanced technology to touch up the photos before they are saved.

There is no shortage of photo software programs available. Given the explosion of digital imaging, every software manufacturer is looking to cash in. As you might expect the companies that have been specializing in this the longest are at the top of the list but there are a few newcomers that deserve mention as well.

At the top of most lists of the best photo editing software is Adobe Photoshop. In many ways, Adobe wrote the book on working with digital images and Photoshop contains everything you would want in digital software from editing tools to organizing images and sharing them. The only drawback associated with Photoshop is that it is twice as expensive as many of the competitors.

If you are looking for a less expensive digital imaging program which has many of the same features as Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Photo Pro typically sells for about 40% less. The editing program, ease of use and support are ranked just as high as Photoshop according to photo editing software review. Where it comes up a little short according to the web site is in image sharing and importing photographs.

There are other less known programs that deserve mention as well. Ulead Photoimpact and Photo Impression are very inexpensive and still get good ratings for editing and organizing images. For the person looking for a cheap way to touch up pictures and store photos on a PC either one of these will work just fine.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Computer program, Photograph