What is Social Networking?  Here is a great video Clip that gives an overview on Social Networking.  This tutorial will help you understand how to use it to your advantage on your website or blog. 

Facebook and MySpace are the best examples.  Learn more about this HOT internet topic.

• Learn what social networking is all about
• And how you can use it to boost your traffic and make money

As with my other offerings, these videos are flash based and the links will open in a new window.

Let me know what you think about this video Series!

-Loren

In this third tutorial you will build on your GIMP knowledge and learn how to create a Web 2.0 Button.  Although this is a basic instructional tutorial I feel that it uses the basic tools that you need to know to do many operations within GIMP.  Creating a button isn’t the most exciting task, but try it, you may like it!

As you go through the tutorial, have your mouse ready to hit the pause button.  The instructor moves pretty fast through the steps, but I’m ok with it, because I don’t like lots of non activity during videos presentations.  (that’s what the pause button is for).

Create Web 2.0 Buttons using GIMP

The run time for this video is about 8.5 minutes and is in flash format.  It moves fast, but provides a lot of good basic information on running the GIMP interface.

Enjoy the Video!

- Loren

Online file storage is a critical feature in todays mobile computing world.  We have large hard drives, but flexibility is important.  In my opinion SkyDrive is the best online file storage system today.

Many people have Windows Live logins for their MSN Messenger (now called Windows Live Messenger) account.  If this is true for you, head over to http://skydrive.live.com and claim your 25GB of free online storage.  I have checked around the net, and have not found any other systems that match the Microsoft SkyDrive product. 

Before I get a bunch of flame e-mails, NO I am not a Microsoft Apologist.  If a product is good, I will recommend it.  This post is just a short review on the pros and cons of this online storage product.

Pros -

• Size – 25 GB is a lot of storage space
• Free – Free is always good
• Stability – Microsoft is going to be around to keep SkyDrive from disappearing
• Flexibility – Works with the Gladinet Cloud Desktop Client to mount Drives on your PC 

 Cons -

• File Size Limit – 50 MB maximum file size (still pretty large)
• Drag and Drop interface only works with Internet Explorer
• Some people are Against Everything Microsoft so they cannot be convinced it is a good product
• Full Functionality assumes you are a PC user – I haven’t tried it on my Mac yet.

I personally use SkyDrive because of the Pros I have listed above.  The Gladinet Cloud Desktop client is great.  I use the free version, and have found it to be pretty stable.  It allows you to create a mounted drive letter on your Windows PC.  It does a good job of synchronizing and moving files in the background. 

Even if you chose not to install the Gladinet driver you can drag and drop files using Internet Explorer.  Maybe there will be some sort of Firefox Plugin in the future, but I wouldn’t hold out waiting for one. 

For the Anti-Microsoft folks out there, actually SkyDrive is a winner, the problem with many "FREE" programs and services on the internet, is that you are at the whim of the company.  So many of them just disappear overnight, or are purchased by another company and phased out.  Nevertheless I do warn people not to trust these free online file storage systems, make sure you have a local backup Just In Case.

I recommend you surf over to the SkyDrive website and give it a try.  Let me know what you think about this online storage product.  Any tips and tricks you can give are appreciated by myself and the other readers.

-Loren

Update - There are persistent rumors that Google is going to do something similar to SkyDrive, but nothing yet.  I have looked at some clever work arounds to store files on your Gmail account, but they are just that "workarounds" and not really online file storage.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is widely know is a key concept that all webmasters and bloggers need to understand.  TheTeachingBox is proud to present a 5 Part Tutorial series on SEO. 

I came across these videos a while back, and thought that they would be a good fit for Technology and Education.  Granted SEO Optimization is a bit more on the advanced side, but everyone could learn from these videos.

As with my other video series, I will present the 5 videos one at a time so that you are able to focus on the content and think about how you will implement the information on your own website.  As we cover each of the videos, I will make sure to include the links to all previous videos so that you can easily go back and review.

The presentation of these video tutorials is well done, and I was able to learn a quite a few tips on how to make my Blog Posts pop to the top of the online Search Engines.  They are all in Flash (.swf) format and will open in a new browser window.  You should have the latest flash viewer to watch them, but if not, your browser should prompt you for the appropriate plugin download.

Search Engine Optimization – Video 1

In this first video you will get an introduction to the Top 10 On Site SEO Fundamentals and how to implement them on your site.  They include the types of HTML formatting, and content you need to make your pages and posts search engine friendly.  The running time for this video is around 24 Minutes. 

In this tutorial I learned about the Traffic Travis tool for Keyword Research and SEO.  He spends almost half of the tutorial talking about it.  It is free and could prove to be a very valuable tool in your webmaster arsenal.

The author of this video knows his stuff, and gives evidence.  Let me know what you think about this series in the comments, or send me an e-mail.  What are your favorite SEO tips and tricks?

If you are interested I can make the set available to you.  They are in .swf format and the .zip files are still quite large.  Drop me an e-mail and we can work something out.

-Loren

Enjoy the Video!

-Loren