Today I received a domain notice in the postal mail marked “URGENT- OPEN IMMEDIATELY” with a return address of Processing Center, PO Box 4668 #82011, New York, NY 10163-4668.  This letter was NOT from the company that I registered any domain names with although it implies just that.  This is a scam and I want to warn anyone else out there that may be fooled by it.  If you own your own website name, or “Domain Name”, you may get this or a similar notice sent to you also.

Upon reading the notice letter, it resembles a typical invoice with options to pay for placement in major search engines based on a 2, 3, or 4 year term.  More specifically, the letter asks for bewteen $119 and $199 to be mailed in to them via check in order to avoid “cancellation” that would make it “difficult for your customers to locate you on the web”.  The letter also states that “You must complete your domain name search engine registration to guarantee your listing on the web”.   This is not true, this is nothing more than a marketing attempt that preys on peoples fear.

Nowhere on the letter does it mention their company name, logo, or a place where the name is actually registered.  It simply requests that checks are made payable to “Domain Registration”.

Attached to this post is a scanned copy of the actual letter I received if you want to take a closer look.

DomainNoticeScam.pdf

Do not send these people money for any reason!  If you have already sent in money to this company (or a similar scam company), I suggest you contact the BBB right away.

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• 3/08 - Animoto Videos for Facebook application
• 3/08 - Export directly to YouTube
• 6/08 - DVD Quality Videos via Download or a mailed Disc
• 6/08 - Animoto for Business (commercial use)
• 8/08 - Animoto for Education (learning)

I have already tried out the Facebook app and the YouTube export and they work beautifully. Next I have to check out the DVD download and see how it looks on my Flat Screen TV. Not to mention the possibilities with Animoto for Business…

Animoto for Business should come in very handy for our real estate agents here at Crossroads Realty. Some real estate agents and brokers are using Animoto videos to highlight featured homes that leave a long lasting impression in their clients minds. After all, an Animoto video is a drastic change from the standard slideshows and some of the less innovative virtual tours out there.

If you want to see an example of how one real estate agent is using Animoto for Business, check out Herman Chan’s California based real estate website.

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Nice work Animoto. Keep the new features coming!

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The problem with real estate photos is that you need different quality copies for different uses… If you are designing flyers and brochures, you will need high quality photos and most likely you can use the files that your digital camera automatically makes.

If you are uploading to the MLS (or any website for that matter), you have less of a requirement for high quality. The smaller the file size, the quicker the page will load. VSO Image Resizer does exactly that, quick and simple!

VSO Image Resizer’s simplicity is also a blessing on an overly complicated world when it comes to real estate agents constantly trying to tackle all the new technology tools and services out there. The process of resizing 20 or 40 photos takes almost no time at all due to the fact that the whole process takes only three basic steps.

You can download it from the VSO Software website, and I suggest you do exactly that right now unless you already have it. Once you have downloaded and installed the program, you can come back here and follow the walkthrough…

Step 1 - Start the program and select photos

As soon as you launch the program, the first thing you will see is a standard “Open File” box window, I believe it automatically opens in the “My Pictures” folder by default. You simply need to find the files you want to resize.

Select the all photos with the selection rectangle or you can hold down Ctrl and select them one at a time and then click “Open”

Step 2 - Pick Resize Settings

Now you are going to tell the image resizer how much you want to resize the photos and also where and how to save them. You can pretty much just look at the image below and set everything the same that I did, don’t forget to check the little box at the bottom next to “Save as default” so that the image resizer can remember these settings for next time.

Here is a little more info on the settings above:

• Profile & Resolution: This is where we set the quality we need. 800×600 is a good all-around choice.
• Action: Set this to Create Copies. That way you will still have your originals intact and a reduced copy will be created.
• Destination: Set this to save the reduced copies in the Same Folder as Originals. This way you stay organized and always know that you can find your reduces photos in the same place that their original counterparts are located.

Step 3 - Wait for the photo to process

That’s really all there is to it, you are now done!

You may be wondering now, “where are the photos?” Well, they are in exactly the same location as the originals, just like we told the image resizer to do. I am also including one last image below so that you can see how to identify the reduced copies from the originals.

My image above shows the reduced copies on the left, along side of their original counterparts on the right. You can notice the reduced copies because they have the resolution [800x600] built right into the file names. This reduced resolution, and in turn the file size, is MUCH smaller now and you should have no problems uploading them to ANY websites out there.

Oh yeah, I’d like to say thank you to the guys over at Animoto for recomending this little program on their website!

Good Luck!

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Built with Ruby-on-Rails technology and using patent-pending “Cinematic Artificial Intelligence”, Animoto takes your still photos and an MP3 song of your choice and turns it into a sophisticated movie production video in almost no time. The video is filled with professional effects and transitions that normally would take 16+ hours to do manually, even for a professional…

Animoto Videos present the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer using the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film. - Animoto

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No two Animoto videos are ever the same, even the same exact photo arrangement can be radically different depending on the style of music you choose. The process intelligently synchronizes each of your photos with the style, structure, and tempo of the music you picked. And, if you don’t like the way a video turned out?… simply click the “Remix” button and Animoto will run the photos and music through their AV blender again for a different outcome every time!

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Using the free account, you are able to produce as many 30 second videos as you like. If you want to produce feature length videos, it costs $3 per video or a full year unlimited pass costs $30. Animoto uses Google Checkout to handle the payment processing so you will have to create an account if you dont already have one… I can’t really argue with Animoto’s pricing, it’s almost hard to imagine how they will make money… Although, I did notice that while you are waiting for your video to be generated, there are a few custom style ads on the right side of the page referred to as “Distractions”. It would appear that these ads could be Animoto’s business model in time to come. For now, the ads just appear to be placeholders.

Ok, back to the fun stuff… The 30 second short video typically can use about 15 photos on average over the 30 seconds, but it all depends on the music you picked. If you pick a slower paced song, the video will not progress through the photos as quickly as it would if you picked a fast paced song. So you really just have to wait and see how your video looks when it come out at the end. The whole process of creating these videos takes about 5-30 min depending on how long it takes you to upload your media and how many other people are waiting in the que to get rendered.

To help make this all a little easier, Animoto can automatically import your pictures from certain online photo storage services…

We currently support direct image retrieval from Flickr, Facebook, Smugmug, Picasa, and Photobucket. Unfortunately, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, and Shutterfly, have a closed system and don’t let users access their photos with outside services like Animoto. We hope they do one day. In the meantime, we’ll keep working with the folks who have established more open systems and give their users more choice with what to do with their photos.

You can use and share your video by emailing it, embedding it into your website, blog, MySpace, Facebook, etc… Coming soon, you will be able to burn your video to disc, send it to cell phones (including the iPhone), and download it to your computer for whatever use you want.

At all times, you retain the rights to your videos produced with Animoto!

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I was quite surprised that traffic cameras were available to the general public, I had always figured this technology was highly guarded by the transportation department. But a quick Google search and look what I find! The New York City Department of Transportation has all the cameras available for viewing right on their website.

Ever time I look around, I find a new website out there accomplishing what I didnt think was possible before… Nice job Local.Alkemis.Com!

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The Graphics Interchange Format (”gif”) was originally developed by CompuServe in 1987 . The GIF format is one of the most popular formats on the Internet and it supports 256 colors (8-bit color). Unlike the JPEG, the GIF is loss-less, meaning it does not get blurry or messy when saving. This format is excellent at compressing areas of images with large areas of the same color.

The most common method of reducing the size of GIF files is to reduce the number of colors on the palette so while this helps preserve accuracy, it also is limited to only simple shapes and text. Because of this format’s limited color palette, GIF images are generally not suitable for photographs all, which typically require high amount of hues, shading, and color gradients.

Transparency & Animation

The GIF format supports transparency. This allows a graphic designer to designate a single background color of the image to be transparent. This means that if you place a transparent GIF in a yellow table cell, the background color of that image will turn yellow. Although, you must design your GIF beforehand with the background color in mind, the same GIF file will not work for all background colors. If your GIF file contains any shading on the outer edges, you will notice that the transparency looks very poor when you put your image on a different color background.

The GIF is currently the only option for putting animation online (unless you want to use Flash or other vector-based animation formats, which typically cost more). Due to GIF’s color limitation of 256 colors, this leaves you with only a few options when it comes to what type of animation you are going to include.

Interlacing

The interlacing feature in a GIF file is very similar to the “Progressive JPEG” feature discussed in my previous Web Image article. GIF interlacing creates the illusion of faster loading graphics. What happens is that an image is presented in a browser in several steps. At first it will be fuzzy and blurry, but as more information is downloaded from the server, the image becomes more and more defined until the entire image has been downloaded. It’s important to note that interlaced GIF files will usually be a bit larger than non-interlaced ones, so use interlacing only when it makes sense.

When to use them

Generally, GIF files should be used for logos, line drawings, icons, and anything involving a lot of text. Avoid using it for pretty much any photographic work. When you’re designing GIF files, avoid using gradients, shading, and turn off anti-aliasing where possible to minimize the file size.

The GIF format will be a very good format for most of the graphics you’ll be using on your site, though PNGs are better in many regards. I will discuss more on the PNG format in my next article. Always remember, experimentation is the key to success.

To view my previous article on Web Image Formats, click HERE.

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If you are curious about any other modifications I have made to this website so far, you can check out my Updates section where I have been logging all my progress building this website.

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How much work do you think would be involved if a company was to set forth the goal of labeling every single image on the Internet? I can guess that you would say this is a very high goal with an unbelievable amount of work involved, and I would have to agree with you 100%. Now, with a task this massive, how could any company possibly pull it off? You would not only need a company that consisted of thousands of employees, but the entire company would have to devote their lives to this new project in order to expect any reasonable amount of results within a good time-frame. That’s where Google comes in, as usual, with a simplistic, yet extremely powerful solution… Let the general public participate and have a little fun while they are at it…

Who would have guessed it, Google has created an online game out of image labeling. Anyone may participate, at any time they wish, for as long as they wish. A single game takes exactly 2 minutes where you will be presented with random images from the Internet. Your goal for the game is to type in as many words as you can to describe the images that you see. You not only score points for the amount of words that you enter, but you also score higher point values for more descriptive text.

For example, if you launch the game and are presented with a simple picture of an apple tree, you could type in single words like apple, tree, plant, etc… But you will score even more points if you type in something more descriptive like apple tree, apple orchard, red apples, etc… You get the idea?.. Good, now here is where the competition comes in…

At the very start of the game Google will partner you up with a random person, and it is only your combined effort that will end up getting scored, not just your own. The point of all this is to make the image labels more relevant by matching identical descriptions written by two random people. So, if both you and your partner typed in apple orchard then you will get a good score. If for some reason, you and your partner are not able to match any labels within the time limit, then you will both score zero points.

Thousands of Internet users can spend a relatively small amount of time. Each user is only working on a simple task, that in the end can accomplish an impressive goal.

This concept is not completely new. Various projects utilizing an open-source technology known as distributed computing have been taking advantage of small amounts of processing power on thousands of computers for years. They do this by running a very sophisticated screen saver on each computer. This screen saver can crunch some serious numbers while you are not even using your computer.

Here is some background on distributed computing:

Each computer that is setup calculates a small piece of a large mathematical puzzle. As each piece of the puzzle is completed, the results are sent back to a main computer that can fit all the pieces together into a massive equation. This equation is so complex that it would normally take a single computer years to calculate the answer, no matter how many Gigahertz it had. This technology is mainly used by scientists for the massive number crunching ability, and it has already advanced scientific research to a point that was never before possible

“SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.”

“On April 27th 2007, the Screensaver Project finally came to a close. The project, developed with the National Foundation for Cancer Research has run for six years and has at various times been funded by Intel, Microsoft and by IBM, but was chiefly a collaboration with United Devices Inc of Austin Texas. It has been an enormous success, involving over 3.5 million personal computers in more than 200 countries. Only the SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] project has had more participants, but none has involved as much data transmission as this research.”

Distributed.net is running various projects trying to see how long it takes to break cryptographic code technologies. A few prises have been offered from RSA Labs to anyone who can crack their “unbreakable” government-endorsed data encryption standards such as RC5 and RSA factoring.

OK now, back to Google and the Image Labeler game:

Although these projects are not necessarily a game, you can see they share the same philosophy that the image labeler game was built on, and I have always respected the way that Google accomplishes goals with such a simplistic solution. This one really blew me away though, I mean, the Google Image Labeler is not nearly the first online game, or the prettiest, but it is one of the few out there where people can actually accomplish something outside of the game they are playing. In the end we will all benefit by a much more relevant image search on Google.

If you would like to try Google’s game out, you can visit the Image Labeler website and select to either Begin as Guest or fill in your own name. After a short wait, you will be partnered up with a random other person and the game will launch. Good luck to you, just keep in mind that it’s more productive than solitaire!

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Choosing the right file format for your images is a very important decision on the internet, its all about retaining quality with the smallest possible file size. Small file size results in quicker page loading, and since you have a criticle amount of time to make a first impression on the internet, faster page loading results in fewer people leaving your website. Out of the three popular formats , each is suited to a specific type of image. Matching your image to the correct format should result in a small, pristine, fast-loading graphic.

The JPEG Format

The JPEG “jay-peg” format was developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group and uses a lossy compression to provide support for 16.7 million possible colors. This allows for the complex blend of hues that occur in photographic images and that is the image type JPG is best suited for.

Each time a JPG image is saved, the image will lose some quality but result in a smaller file size. Lossy compression essentially throws away “extra” information, and depending on what settings you use, the thrown out data may or may not even be visible to the human eye. In practical use, a compression setting of about 60% should result in the perfect balance between quality and filesize, without letting the lossy compression do too much damage. One important point to make is that once you lower the quality of a JPG image and throw away the information, the extra data can NOT be regained. So, feel free to experiment, but always be sure to save your original!

Another feature of JPG files is that they can often be saved as a Progressive JPEG. This type of image presents a low-quality image to the viewer at first, and over several “passes” improves the quality of it. Some graphic editing tools allow you to specify the number of passes before the image downloads completely. This will allow a viewer to see the image sooner than normally but it will seem blurry for a second as the rest of the clarity gets downloaded. This criticle few moments can be all the difference in a better experience for your users since a blurry image is better than nothing at all. And, by the time they realize the image is blurry, it is already clearing up.

Although not needed often for photographs, JPG files lack the ability for animation and transparency and also tend to make text look very low in quality when saved at almost any compression setting. If any of these issues are important to your particular image then the GIF or the PNG would be a much better choice as I will explain in my next articles in the Web Image Format series…

To view the next article in this series, click HERE.

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