Tech Tuesday

I want to start a tech column in a local publication. I'm not the biggest techno geek and neither am I a ludite. I'm somewhere in the middle and therefore well suited to choose tech issues of interest to only moderately tech savy people and to do so in plain language. I hope.

Google Video Changes the Game
If you have a website, even just a blog, www.video.google.com is putting you in a position to be able to have video on your site easily and without fears of using more bandwidth than you can you afford.
Sign up for a free account and you're able to submit videos to the huge database of video files Google is compiling. Google will take any video as long as it's not deemed obscene. They host the videos and they even have a hand dandy link that will give you the code to put the video on you site. You're visitors will view the clip from your page while Google takes the hit to the bandwidth.
Don't have any videos of your own? You can peruse through, find clips you like and put them on your site. Remember that other webmasters and bloggers can also use your clips without crediting you, so if you're submitting original material identify yourself in the clip.

This is one step back towards keeping the small time players in the game with the big boys who would just as soon own the inernet the way they own TV and radio.

Click here for an example of this site using Google Video to host a clip.

A Tip for Online Shoppers
A quick lesson was learned this weekend. Ordering three books on Amazon my girlfriend was bummed to find two of them didn' t qualify for free shipping. She looked at the more expensive versions of the same books, which were only a dollar more, but came with free shipping. The shipping would have been about four bucks a book, so we saved six bucks and our books are on the way.

Podcasting?
Apple is to be commended. They've done a great job of making folks think that they have a monopoly on Podcasting, hell it's even named after their product. So, for the many folks I've run into who still don't know you don't need an I-Pod or even a portable MP3 player to listen to podcasts. A podcast is just an Mp3, and most podcaster use something called an RSS feed to send out and automatic notice when they upload a new episode, that is to say a new MP3. There are many services now that will allow you to sign up for the RSS feed once you get the address from the podcast you're interested in subscribing too. Apple does indeed offer one of the best and it's free at iTunes.com.

That's it for now. I'd love to hear your ideas and I'll get some more out next week.