October 19th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
Pamela Recording for Skype is a great little tool for recording your skype calls. The basic version is free and will record 15 minutes of a Skype conversation.
The standard version will record 30 minutes of conversation at a time at a cost of $14.95 US. The professional and the business versions will record an unlimited amount of a call in to run the option of recording Skype video and Skype chats along with building in the podcasting system and blogging systems.
All versions of the product are available in a free trial for 30 days!
This tool comes highly recommended by both Podcasters and professional voice artists. It is relatively inexpensive and offers a number of other bonus options that will be useful for many people especially the answering machine options. At prices ranging from $0-$45. At about 1/6th of the price of lower end Movado watches, it’s not terribly expensive. If you’re looking to do a podcast, or capture a brainstorm during a Skype call, then this tool could be invaluable.
I’ve tried many other applications, that were offered as free downloads, or charged just a few dollars, and most of them have been ripoffs. If you find one that works better than this for a better price, let me know. Until then, this is the one that I recommend. 
June 1st, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
When I first got into blogging a few years back, I had this idealistic notion that I might be able to save every great idea or insight that I had ever created.
I could save these gems for posterity or that odd ball Google Searcher that just happened to need the answer to something that I had found years earlier. Those long tail trickles of viewers or readers might along the way happen to click on my Google ad and my long tail would create a fat bank account.
Well all that idealism was pretty much just that, idealism. My long tail has never become long enough nor fat enough to correlate into a fat bank account. However, I still like to harvest gems from my past and publish them online where they might still someday be useful.
Back before I started publishing online, I used this great software for a project I was working on. We had some old reports from a database that was long dead and moth balled. They were on paper, and we needed the data fast.
We had the option of hiring temps to hand type them in or run them through a scanner with an optical character reader so that we could ultimately push the data into excel and a new database.
I mention that little story, because I’m getting ready to buy that software (now in version 16, back then in version 6 or 7) so that I can scan a large amount of content that I have on paper so that I can get it efficiently published.
Up until now, I have been reading it with Dragon Naturally Speaking which enables me to essentially type at 150 words a minute. That’s not quite double my own physical typing capability. Its good, but not as good as dropping a batch of papers onto a feeder tray, hitting start and letting my computer scan and read those documents over night while I’m sleeping!
The program is called OmniPage 16 and its one of the industry leaders in Optical Character Recognition a technology that is an old friend of mine from my days working in the Postal Service where we had excellent optical character readers that could read twice as many characters ever 3-6 months.
As with any technology, I still need to ponder when and where the best situations to use this tool might be, but the company is offering me a price I can’t refuse, so I won’t! I may not waste my time scanning travel guides and junk mail, but I’m sure that I will get some benefit out of the tool.
It even has the ability to take a picture from a camera of writing and convert it to computer text! Can you say “White Board”?
October 13th, 2007
by
Brett Bumeter
Bloggers have been plagued for quite sometime when people come around and steal their content, posting it as their own on a different site.
Well there’s a new trend for scarfing content that is probably legal and possibly even helpful for bloggers. But can result in some funny consequences.
The concept is that instead of ripping off an entire article, a topical website will keep a Google news or blog search running. Every time an article comes up that mentions a keyword, the program will pull the excerpt from the original blog and post that excerpt in a new article on the topical blog.
As an example, here is a cosmetic surgery site. I wrote a ludicrous article on a satire blog (this is how I beat writers block) called The Viral Grape Vine. This article was about the crazy concept of Barack Obama having an affair with Hillary Clinton.
In the article I mention within a fake salicious quote the word Botox and this resulted in the cosmetic site picking the quote up and publishing it! Little did they know that the botox reference was inappropriate in nature, because they are not real people publishing the excerpt!
So for everyone out there that wants to run some automated content through their site, you might think twice before you do that!
If you own this site and happen across this, good try, sorry to screw up your system, let me buy you a drink at Paris Las Vegas if you go to Blogworld this year.
PS No I do not know what program they are running.
