1) Youtube - After learning how to put youtube links in the blog  (i.e. and seeing how easy this becomes this has been one of the most helpful for me in blogging. It is nice to have a visual representation of what I am talking about so that everyone knows what I am talking about.

2) Slideshare - Call me crazy but I had never used this site before taking Com 495 at the University of Washington. I never realized it was so easy to share on wordpress. This was a great tool for sharing picture too. This is definately something to explore. 

3) Zamzar – When you need to convert files in order to use on your blog, this site is great for this! I have struggled with the conversion of files so much in the past that this has been a godsend when it comes to doing this.  

4) Creative Commons - For this, two sites actually are important.

4a)One is the creative commons licensing that I learned how to copy paste into my site. This allows other readers to see what my policy is on using my work.  

4b) Flickr – The other site is flickr because this site also lets users to an advanced search by creative commons pictures. Before this class, I had no idea that I should have been more careful with copyright and use these tools, not only to protect my work but to prevent me to taking unlawfully others work. Plus, it has loads of picture to choose from.  

5) Delicious - Finding new stuff to explore, discovering new content. Plus bookmarking it. This site helps bloggers do it all is seems.

I am pretty sure everyone in our class has explored all of these sites at this point, but if you haven’t take a look again. For instance, create a powerpoint with music, put it on slideshare and post it on wordpress. This process before seemed too difficult and now it is a reality. I have learned a lot about blogging in this course and I hope to find many more sites that are just as helpful.

The Guardian has just announced their list of the Top 100 websites for 2009 and we’re honoured that Zamzar has been recognised in the “Create/collaborate” section.

Zamzar is one of only 2 sites in that section which remain from the Guardian’s 2008 list (the other being NetVibes).

We’ve worked hard this year to improve the site with dozens of new conversion types (including CAD, Visio and MS Project) and the ability to convert documents into speech.

We’re excited about what 2010 has in store, but we wouldn’t be anywhere without you.

So a big thanks to all of you who use the service, tell your friends and colleagues about it and keep us busy with suggestions on how to improve it

Happy Converting,
The Zamzar Team.

Have you ever tried to open a file on a Ridley High School computer, only to discover that the file isn’t compatible with the software on our Macs? Does this always seem to happen to you just minutes before your project is due? If this situation sounds all too familiar, then you need to know about ZAMZAR. This is a fantastic file conversion Web site that allows you to upload files and get them converted into Ridley-compatible Word files FOR FREE! It just takes four easy steps:

1. Upload the files to convert

2. Choose the format to convert to (.doc or .docx)

3. Enter your e-mail address

4. Click on “Convert”

Then check your e-mail for a link to download your converted file. Remember: www.zamzar.com is a FREE, file-converting, panic-preventing Web site to know and use.

The good folks at TechCrunch have just announced that voting has opened for the 2009 “Crunchie” awards which recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.

If you’ve had fun using Zamzar then why not nominate us for the best international startup award ? Nominations close at midnight PST December 4, 2009.

You can read more about the 2009 Crunchies here.

Happy voting !
The Zamzar Team.

Zamzar beta

Thanks to Ian Kitajima for this tip.  Zamzar is a free online service that allows you to upload and convert a ton of different kinds of files, from images to video.  No registration for the free service. Convert up to five 100 MB files at a time.  If  you sign-up for a paid plan you also get online storage.  It’s  $7/mo for the Basic plan for files up to 200 MB file plus 5 GB of online storage and goes up from there.  Go to www.zamzar.com/signup/# for their plans and cost.

One of my clients has a pretty stout list of reference customers. Everything except their zip code. Oh and the list is in a wps format. This is Microsoft Works. An old version at that. I try installing converters, tricking Word, changing extensions, using Notepad and Wordpad. Nothing will open this wps file. One quick search on opening wps files, I find Zamzar, upload the file to Zamzar, and two minutes later (actually less than that), I have a converted file ready to go in Word.

Thank you Zamzar. A perfect online service if ever there was one.

fyi, Zamzar looks to be able to convert just about anything to anything. High on my list of services.

First of all, a big thanks to all of you who took the time out to enter the Zamzar third birthday competition.

We had a great time reading all of your entries, and a hard time selecting our favourites, but here are the three winners.

chadkafka:

iiamcrystal:

ElricKeyblade:

We’ve contacted all 3 on Twitter to arrange your Pro accounts.

The honorable mention award goes to jonguntrip for his humorous yet cheeky message. Better luck next time Jon …

Sorry to those of you that didn’t win – We’ll look at running more competitions in future, so stay tuned to the blog, Twitter and our Facebook Fan page for future announcements.

Happy Converting !
The Zamzar Team.

Mazel Tov ! Zamzar is celebrating its third birthday today

We’ve come from humble beginnings – here is what the very first edition of the service looked like:

We’ve come a long way since then, and now handle tens of thousands of conversions every day. We wanted to say a big THANK YOU to you guys – all the people who use our services, and to celebrate …

We’re giving away 3 professional accounts to the Zamzar service for 1 year !

To enter the competition to win a pro account just send out a tweet on Twitter to complete the following sentence: “I ♥ http://www.zamzar.com because …”

Go for something funny / original / amusing and we’ll pick our 3 favourite tweets and list the winners here on the blog early next week.

Happy Tweeting !
The Zamzar Team.

We’re broadening our support for Microsoft Office formats, and you can now use Zamzar to convert any of the following formats into Microsoft’s .xlsx format – an increasingly popular spreadsheet format introduced in MS Office 2007:

• csv – Comma Separated Values
• ods – OpenDocument spreadsheet
• wks – Microsoft Works Spreadsheet
• xls – Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet

We hope this conversion will be useful to those of you who receive documents in these formats from colleagues and friends who need them returned in the .xlsx format.

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team

SISK12

Click the question to view the handout with the answer.

1. Can I print an individual student report listing all their assignment and current grade?
2. Can I print a class grade report that lists each student by number, not name?

My students want a club website that they can edit, post pictures on, ask and answer questions, etc. I want to have total control over what appears on the website. Should I use Facebook for this?

I think the best tool for this situation is a class blog. You can use WordPress.com to create a free class blog with options to add students as contributors, meaning they can write articles for the blog, but the articles won’t appear until the teacher approves them. You also have the option to allow visitors to leave comments, but those comments are moderated by the teacher prior to appearing on the blog. For your convenience, you can choose to receive an email whenever a comment awaits approval. You can reference my WordPress handout, email me and I’ll get you started.

The District has recently published a Social Networking Best Practices document for our staff’s reference.

I found a video on YouTube that I want to use in a PowerPoint slideshow. How can I make that happen?

First, since YouTube is blocked at school you will have to do this at home, or ask me to do it for you. I charge a small few for such services….not really. ;>) Zamzar is a free online tool for downloading and converting video files. Here are the steps:

*The email will contain a link for you to click to go to the Zamzar website to download the converted video file. This link is good for up to 1 day from receipt of email message. This process of taking the video from YouTube to Zamzar, converting, and downloading to your station takes several minutes.

To insert the video into a powerpoint slide:

If when you play the video you hear audio, but the video remains a black box you may need to disable video acceleration.

You can now use Zamzar to convert MS Word documents (.doc files) into a variety of different image formats, including jpg, gif and png. This conversion is really useful for situations when you might want to embed graphics or thumbnails of Word documents into a website, or to share the contents of a document with a client in a format that can’t be edited by them.

You can now convert MS Word documents into any of the following formats:

• bmp – Windows bitmap
• gif – Compuserve graphics interchange
• jpg – JPEG compliant image
• pcx – PC Paintbrush Bitmap Graphic
• png – Portable Network Graphic
• ps – Postscript document
• thumbnail – Thumbnail image
• tiff – Tagged image file format

MS Word doesn’t allow you to save into any of these image formats, so to convert your Word docs, just head on over to Zamzar.

Happy Converting !
The Zamzar Team.

You can now use Zamzar to convert a variety of image files into the ever-popular PDF format.

Converting images into PDF can be useful when you need to share designs or graphics with clients in a standard and professional format which they are likely to be able to view. Adobe Acrobat has a huge installed base, and converting to PDF is a nice way of adding a professional touch to your design.

You can now convert any of the following formats into PDF:

• bmp – Windows bitmap
• gif – Compuserve graphics interchange
• ico – Windows Icon
• jpg – JPEG compliant image
• pcx – PC Paintbrush Bitmap Graphic
• png – Portable Network Graphic
• ps – Postscript document
• tga – Truevision Targa Graphic
• thumbnail – Thumbnail image
• tiff – Tagged image file format
• wbmp – Wireless Bitmap File Format

Just head over to Zamzar to convert.

Happy Converting,
The Zamzar Team.

We’ve just added the ability to convert EPS files to PDF using Zamzar, online and for free.

As we mentioned on Tuesday when we announced the ability to convert EPS to other image formats, Encapsulated PostScript is a popular a graphics file format, designed around the PostScript specification, often used for vector and bitmap graphics artwork.

However PDF is becoming increasingly popular as a replacement for the EPS format, mainly due to its versatility as a delivery format for sending complete publications to press, for soft-proofing, distribution on the Internet, and file archiving.

Just head on over to Zamzar to convert your EPS files today !

Happy converting !
The Zamzar Team

We’re pleased to announce that Zamzar has just been named by the Telegraph as one of the top 100 UK startups for 2009 – we’re currently number 15 on a list compiled from 50,000 companies.

We’ve been working hard here at Zamzar HQ to improve our services, and it’s always great to get recognized for that.

However we wouldn’t be who we are without you our users – so please accept a big heartfelt THANKS from us for continuing to use and promote Zamzar

You can read more about the list, and the other companies that made it over at the Telegraph online.

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team

We’ve fixed up Zamzar to allow you to download and convert videos from DailyMotion, the popular video sharing website.

You can convert videos into a variety of different formats, including avi, mov, mp4 (ideal for iPhone), wmv and more.

So why not go grab this video of a man balancing a car on his head !

Happy Converting,
The Zamzar Team.

We’ve just updated Zamzar’s YouTube video conversion service, so that converted videos are now named with the title of the video from YouTube.

Previously videos had just been using the YouTube video ID, which often resulted in some rather odd names for your converted videos !

We hope you enjoy the change

Happy Converting,
The Zamzar Team.

We’re excited to announce a new partnership with the Ask Partner Network !

The Zamzar Ask toolbar is free and can be installed into your Firefox or Internet Explorer web browser to give you access to tools designed to make browsing and file conversion more convenient:

• Search the Web anytime using Web search from popular search engine Ask.com
• Get access to key Zamzar functions and news at the click of a button
• Find the most popular videos being converted on Zamzar
• Grab information on different file format types

The toolbar is free, so why not grab it, give it a spin, and let us know what you think in the comments below:

This is the first release of the toolbar, and we hope to add more advanced and exciting features in future releases. Stay tuned for more !

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team.

Check out Zamzar. They offer free online file conversion. Not only can you convert your word doc to pdf, you can convert your pdf to a word doc, an excel spreadsheet, or an image (jpeg, etc).

Very easy to use. You enter your file to be converted, enter the form you want it to converted to, enter your email address and VOILA!, they email you the converted file.

http://www.zamzar.com

If you have any technical problems with converting files, or other things, check out Online Tech Tips. This is a good place for ironing out bugs for those of us non-techie people.

http://www.online-tech-tips.com/

Sau những bài viết có cập nhật cuối cùng vào tháng trước thì hiện nay (tháng 6 năm 2006) lại có những thay đổi để người dùng phải biết nếu không sẽ gặp vài trở ngại khi tải FLV và chuyển đổi qua AVI hay các định dạng Mov video khác.

Với phần mềm Pazera hoặc cuối cùng là Mediaconverter.org đã giới thiệu ,thì hiện nay phiên bản dùng cho online và nhất là dùng offline ( standalone) đã gặp thông báo “error flv@xxxxx” và không convert FLV qua AVI được.Kể cả những clip xem từ IE8 ,lấy về qua tệp chính trong máy từ Temp-Internet vẫn không dùng chuyển đổi dược,chỉ xem hay dùng định dạng FLV thì tốt bình thường .Một số clip FLV khác thì vẫn convert AVI được với phần mềm Media Converter nguyên do các loại video này không có dùng qua các hỗ trợ của Adobe hoặc một chương trình có bản quyền mới nào khác.

Như vậy ,sẽ rất trở ngại khi “có cái được- có cái không” sẽ làm mất thời gian và bực bội khi sử dụng.Một vài trường hợp do máy thiếu codex thì cài thêm K.licodexpack hoặc Full thì tạm giải quyết thấy convert được,nhưng thật ra đó chỉ là các clip flv không “bị’ error như đã nói ở trên.

Bạn có thể cập nhật hai cách dùng sau đây,gọi là hiệu quả hoàn toàn tuỳ thuộc vào sự ưa thích của bạn.

Zamzar.com thì bạn chỉ cần truy cập vào và dùng online với bất cứ Flv clip từ nguồn video server nào.Mở email tải về Video clip với định dạng Avi hay Mov hay bất cứ dạng nào bạn đã chọn sử dụng tốt.

GIỚI THIỆU PHẦN MỀM aTube-Catcher :
Tên mới của  chương trình là  “Smart Media Hunter “.

Khi cài đặt xong,khi cần thì mở phần mềm ,dán URL của video vào ,chọn định dạng ra là AVI hay WMV hay MP4 …và nhấp nút “convert” là xong.Video sẽ lưu trên Desktop theo mặc định ( hoặc chọn một thư mục nào khác ).
Dùng Offine : mở bất kỳ tập tin video nào có trong máy tính ( đã có lưu) và cho convert rất tốt.
( với các clip FLV đã gặp thông báo error@xxx khi dùng Mediaconverter thì nay chuyển đổi với aTube-Catcher thành công ,hoàn toàn không gặp trở ngại nào.
DOWNLOAD ATUBE-CATCHER ;
Từ website chính thức của aTube-Catcher thì LINK DOWNLOAD cũng đưa về Softonic.com.Tải về kèm theo Softonic Toolbar ( nếu bạn thường xuyên download các Free softwares thì nên dùng Toolbar này.)
Click vào Link download bên trên để tải phần mềm về cài đặt.

Nếu máy vi tính của bạn chưa có Klite codex thì bạn có thể tải về hai tập tin sau để xem FLV ngay trong Windows Media Player:

• FLV SPLITTER.
• FFDSHOWS.

***Còn một trường hợp cuối,có thể khi Install hoặc lúc mở aTube=Catcher để dùng bạn sẽ thấy Windows Installer chạy – cứ cho CANCEL ( 3 lần) là sau đó aTube-catcher sẽ mở ra bình thường.
Đây là trường hợp riêng tại VN với các máy có Office 2003 mà Microsoft muốn…mình “lên đời” vất office 03 đi ,nên việc Windows Installer chạy là không thể làm già khác được.Nếu để “nó” chạy hoàn tất ,WI sẽ hỏi đĩa cài đặt Office ,đòi active…NHỚ CANCEL đến 3 lần.

Theo XHTT (Sameshow)

OCR Terminal: Free Online OCR – Convert PDF to word, jpeg to word, scanned images to editable text via kwout

I just have to tell you about what is probably my favorite Web 2.0 tool yet, thanks to Lisa Nocita, a library media specialist in Kansas. And if you ever need to convert PDF files to .doc files aka Word documents or .rtf files, you are going to thank your lucky stars that you are my friend and that I was the one who introduced you to OCR Terminal. And I am about to save you the $449.00 you would have to pay for Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro that you may only need occasionally to convert the odd file, when all you need to do is highlight it or work with it more easily. Now if you are doing a lot of work with PDF files, then by all means, go ahead and buy Acrobat 9 Pro, it is a great product with many more capabilities, but if you are like me, just going to graduate school, needing to read a paper you’ve saved, want to be able to highlight a few points for your own use, maybe cut and paste the important parts to a new file (note: don’t steal other people’s work; remember we’re talking about using this for citation purposes, not plagiarizing!) or delete the stuff you know you won’t use, then OCR Terminal is perfect, and it even looks good in most instances. You can even convert scanned files to text easily with OCR Terminal. You can convert up to 30 pages a day for free, so I guess if you’re busy one day, you may have to wait until the next day to convert all of your files. Actually, I don’t think they notice if you log out and login again that you’re doing over 30 pages a day. I think it is actually 30 pages per login. You may also be thinking to yourself, “How can I convert my files to PDF format for free?” Well, you can use CutePDF to do that. You have to download the software, but it is free. It acts like it is one of your printers, but it isn’t, obviously. When you select it as the printer, all it does is convert the selected document to a PDF file. You can also do this with Zamzar, and supposedly Zamzar goes both ways–PDF to .doc and vice versa, but I did not have good results being able to work with my file once I converted it from PDF to .doc or .rtf. So my advice would be to stick with OCR Terminal for that. And if you just can’t think of anything else to do with your $449, email me and I’ll send you my address so you can send me a check.

Have you ever experienced that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you’re emailed an important Word document in docx format and realized that you couldn’t open it? For me, it was a big pain in the ass whenever someone emailed me a docx file because that meant I had to email them back for a doc file that may or may never get to me.

Well, needless to say, I got fed up with that and decided to find a good file converter for docx files. I nearly slapped myself when I found a site with the first Google result. After a bit more searching, I managed to find another online file converter that was able to handle more file types.

And so, the two most useful sites ever:

1. Media-Convert: This is absolutely an amazing online file converter. It handles every single file type that you will ever run into and then some. EXCEPT… docx. There are literally dozens of file types that this converter will take, and you can convert any file type to another in the same category. If you ever need to convert anything, media-convert is hands down the best site to go to. The one thing I do have against the site is that it can be slow sometimes, but the convenience outweighs this samll negative.
2. Zamzar: I use this site primarily for docx files, but it also handles many other types of files. The one unique feature about this site is that it sends you your converted files by email so that you don’t have to wait on the site. Unfortunately, it can sometimes take an hour or two.