Music and technology aren’t unfamiliar bedfellows, but the i-Tab offers a unique method for enhancing your guitar with gadgetry: clamp it on. Like a TomTom for tunes, the electronic songbook prompts players with chords and lyrics for thousands of songs.
For hundreds of years guitarists have mastered their instrument with patience and practice. But this is 2010—who has time to practice? The i-Tab accelerates the learning process by offering thousands of dynamic tabs, scrolling chords at any tempo while you stumble your way through the song.
The device has a 5′ touch screen—using your guitar pick as stylus is encouraged—and 4GB of memory to hold the songs, which can be downloaded through a tab store. The company claims there will be 5000 tunes available at launch.
On some songs you can accompany your noodling with backing tracks that can be played over speakers or headphones. And youll probably need them—having the i-Tab clamped to your guitar isnt likely to win you many bandmates. Sure itll fast-track your fingerpicking, but at what price.
Well, the price of $199 and looking like a dweeb, as it turns out. Pre-orders are slated to be filled first week in March. [i-Tab via Oh Gizmo]
(Via Gizmodo.)
Apple’s Mighty Mouse (now also called an Apple Mouse) has a dirty little secret. While the scroll ball performs its duties as intended when the mouse is new, it can become clogged with dirt and grime over time.
Its performance then deteriorates dramatically, with the ball sticking and failing to scroll. There are a number of things you can do to try and free the ball, and return it to its full 360-degree scrolling glory.
First of all, try turning it upside down and rolling the ball around. Roll it on a piece of paper, hoping the debris and dirt will rub off onto it. Give it a blast with a can of compressed air, or a rub with computer-cleaning solution or a wet wipe. But if all else fails, a drastic course of action may be required.
Removing and cleaning a Mighty Mouse’s scroll ball isn’t particularly easy. A considerable amount of disassembly is required before you can clean the ball and its housing.
In this tutorial, we show you how to get inside your Mighty Mouse without damaging it, and how to clean and reinvigorate your scroll ball to get everything up and running again. It should take approximately 20 minutes, but be prepared to invest a little more time if needed, especially the first time you clean your mouse in this way.
A word of warning
Caution! Disassembling your Mighty Mouse involves breaking off a component that’s glued into place. It’s not easy, and if you make a mistake, you’re extremely likely to damage or even ruin the device.
We can’t take responsibility if your Mighty Mouse is broken while following this tutorial, and as a result we can only recommend that you attempt it if your mouse is in such poor condition that you feel you’ve nothing to lose, if you give it a go.
It is recommended that you read the whole of this tutorial before you start, especially Steps 2 and 3.
PDF OCR is a simple drag-and-drop utility for Mac OS X that converts your PDFs into text documents. It uses advanced OCR (optical character recognition) technology to extract the text of the PDF even if that text is contained in an image. This is particularly useful for dealing with PDFs that were created via a Scan-to-PDF function in a scanner or photo copier. Supports English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Vietnamese, and Italian currently. The OCR engine is based on Tesseract.
Limited to PDFs of 1 page or less. Enterprise Version ($29.99), no limit on the size of the PDF.
(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)
Not all MP3s are created equal. The quality of some MP3s are good, others are barely audible. Among the thousands of songs on your hard drive, I’m sure that there are several that fall into the category of ‘should be better’ — the ones with low volume settings, the ones with weak vocals, the one with too much bass, and other various imperfect conditions.
The quick fix is adjusting the equalizer. But there are situations where repeated re-adjusting is annoying. You need a permanent fix.
I also have quite a few imperfect songs. Having just finished the eBook ‘Recording Your Next Hit With GarageBand‘, most of GarageBand’s tricks and tools are still fresh in my head. They are more than qualified to enhance and improve the quality of MP3s.
Please note that even the best audio tools out there have their limitations. Nobody can enhance Bon Jovi’s song and turn it into Celine Dion’s. With that in mind, let’s get started.
Open GarageBand and start a new project. Basically, you can choose any of the templates, but it’s preferable to use the ones that comes with the least tracks like ‘Voice’ and ‘Loops’. We are going to delete all the tracks anyway.
Today Adobe Photoshop turns 20. While birthday celebrations for software might seem kind of silly, for a program like Photoshop — which has literally become a verb and has had a huge impact on the world of photography and graphic design — the partying seems justified.
Adobe is going all-out for the 20th anniversary, taking to Twitter and Facebook and holding parties around the globe.
Japan, Southeast Asia and Europe are also getting into the party spirit. Adobe Germany is going to do a 20-hour online marathon, with local experts showing off their favorite tips and tricks. France and India will also be celebrating, with contests to showcase the talents of Photoshop users.
Between Twitter, Facebook, and Googles new social networking tool, Buzz, its hard to turn a corner without running into another social network. But how do you know which networking tool fits you best? Were here—with big charts and all—to help.
Last week Google Buzz made us ask ourselves what we wanted out of social networking. To answer that question, we charted what we liked and disliked about setup, privacy, usability, and other aspects of Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook. Here’s the result.
This chart doesn’t cover everything about every network out there. MySpace is (seemingly) on the decline or, at best, re-purposing itself. LinkedIn is really a business contact pool, FourSquare a geo-location game, and other networks generally too niche to be compared in the same aspects and categories.
For the simple read, here’s the full chart of our Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook comparison. We color-coded each answer to give a context of where it stood, in comparison to what we know is possible and what a smart user would like to see. Red means that you can’t rely on this network for this feature. Yellow indicates that the network offers it or makes due, but could definitely be better. Green means something works, and can be considered a selling point.
The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.
Google may have finally figured out social media, even if there have been some major slip-ups in the way. The implications of that realization could dramatically change social media as a tool and as an industry.
On Tuesday, February 9th, Google launched Buzz for Gmail, a service for sharing thoughts, multimedia, and your social media feeds with your friends utilizing Gmail as the conduit. The result: over 160,000 Google Buzz posts and comments per hour.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Google didn’t launch a small addition to Gmail — no, it has dropped a nuclear bomb whose fallout will permanently alter the social media landscape. I could never have predicted that it would become so popular so fast when I first learned about it.
Why? Why has it grown so rapidly? Why has it riled up such strong emotions on both sides? Are the privacy issues going to permanently damage Google? And most of all, what does Google Buzz mean for Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the social media world?
Factors on Generating Traffic to Your Blog: “
Over the last few weeks I’ve had three conversations with readers regarding different sources of traffic.
In each case I had a number of email exchanges with each blogger (all on the same day) and ended up laughing to myself at the common theme but extremely different opinions being expressed by each of the bloggers.
In each case the bloggers had strong opinions (and experiences to back those opinions up) on what type of traffic was ‘best’ and how to get it.
I was reminded through these conversations just how many different valid approaches there are to blogging. I also came away with a few thoughts that I thought I’d jot down here on the topic of driving traffic to blogs.
The above chart shows just 8 of many sources of traffic to a blog. As I write this others are already springing to mind (for example some bloggers run paid advertising to drive traffic to their blog – others get it from banner exchange programs). The reality is that there are many potential sources of traffic.
As I thought about the 3 bloggers I was chatting to above it struck me that each had found great sources of traffic but that they were each operating in very different niches.
The first blogger who had written off social media was in a niche that people were simply not using social media for (I won’t reveal the niche as I don’t have their permission but it was a very very niche focused blog). Perhaps they could have driven a tiny bit of traffic with social media but for them Search was a much better place for them to invest their time.
Another important factor to consider is that some sources of traffic will monetize ALOT better than others. I’ve found that search traffic can work very well with AdSense for example (it depends upon the niche and intent of the reader). People arrive on your site searching for specific information, read your content, see an ad that relates to their search term and click on it.
RSS readers on the other hand don’t tend to convert for AdSense as they tend to be loyal readers and many don’t even click through to your site to read your content. RSS readers (and social media traffic) however can convert really well for affiliate promotions or selling your own products to.
As a blog matures its sources of traffic often quite naturally change.
There’s no typical one size fits all pattern to this but at first the traffic might mainly come from other blogs or forums where you comment – or blogs where you guest post – or articles that you write. In time you might start to see more traffic from RSS or newsletters as a few people subscribe. Perhaps then some traffic will come from other sites who link to you (people who subscribe via RSS might have their own blogs) and from social media. After a while your search engine ranking might kick in as a result of the links from other sites and your guest posting and article writing and you might start seeing Google traffic. Once your blog is more established you might start seeing social bookmarking viral events that spike your traffic.
Again – this is not going to be the pattern for all blogs but in time traffic will naturally start to come from different places – the key is to try to leverage it for ongoing good (trying to get your blog to be sticky rather than just having one time visitors) and to work out how to convert that traffic for the goals you have.
While each of the three bloggers had discovered great lessons and good sources of traffic for their niches and the life cycles of their blogs – I was left wondering in each case whether the bloggers were being a little too closed off to different sources of traffic that perhaps could have added to the overall mix of traffic.
I see a lot of SEO type bloggers write about the worthlessness of social traffic for instance. One common comment that I get from some SEOs (definitely not all) is that social media traffic can’t be monetized. The reality could not be further from the truth. It won’t always convert but it certainly can. For example I know in each of the E-book launches that I’ve done in two niches that I’ve seen significant conversions from Twitter traffic.
On the flip side of things I hear some social media focused bloggers write off SEO and say that it works itself out and you don’t need to optimise your blog for search if you just produce good content. While there is some truth in that (good content does tend to generate natural incoming links to some extent) with a basic understanding of principles of SEO and a few minor tweaks a blog can rank much better in search engines without compromising the integrity of the content.
I guess what I’m getting at is that if you get exclusive about the type of traffic you are after you could actually be limiting the potential of your blog’s incoming traffic.
I used to be very focused upon search traffic in my early days of blogging. I worked hard to optimise my first blogs for search and got to a point where I was making a full time living from the ad revenue I was getting almost exclusively from Google. As a result I got a little lazy in some of the other areas – I didn’t work to convert readers to be loyal with newsletters or with prominent calls to subscribe to RSS, I didn’t build too many relationships with other bloggers to generate referral traffic and I was very inactive in social media (although it was much more limited back then).
As a result when Google decided to adjust their algorithm one day and my rankings dropped (and almost completely disappeared) in their results I lost almost all of my traffic – and as a result almost all of my income.
I was lucky in that Google readjusted their algorithm a couple of months later and I regained a lot of (but not all) of that traffic but in the mean time I looked for and found a ‘real job’ – and more importantly learned an important lesson about the power of having more than one source of traffic.
That experience was the beginning of me doing a few things that included working harder on capturing readers as subscribers (email and RSS), networking more with other bloggers in my niche and getting more involved in promoting my blog in other places (mainstream media, social media etc). My hope in doing all of this was to build up other sources of traffic so that if Google ever switched off my traffic again (temporarily or permanently) I’d at least have enough traffic to survive.
Google still does send me around 40-50% of my traffic (it varies a little from blog to blog) but I’m in a position now where I could survive for an extended period if it all disappeared (not that I’d like for that to happen).
I’m sure there are other factors that are at play that might be worth considering when looking at traffic. One of these (that I’m yet to fully think through) is personality type.
For example a lot of my my technically thinking friends seem to enjoy the challenge of SEO a little more. They love experimenting with and testing what happens when they make small tweaks to different aspects of their blogs. They’re constantly testing different setups and do quite well from it. I am not technically minded and find their attention to detail very very unusual (and so far from where that I’m at that I feel like I’m from another planet).
Other friends are perhaps a little more social by nature and as a result seem to do well on Twitter.
Others seem to do better by applying their freakish ability to write blog posts that get tonnes of links from other sites and which do brilliantly on social bookmarking sites..
Others are networkers and spend a lot of time interacting with other bloggers and site owners and tend to get links and traffic that way.
Others just seem to be brilliant at building community on their blog and as a result retain almost everyone who ever comments and build new readers from those people telling their friends.
I guess the lesson here is to be yourself and work with your strengths. Of course you don’t want to let your strengths dominate so much that you ignore or become lazy in areas that you’re not as strong in – but do follow your natural abilities and leverage them as much as you can.
Remember that there is no wrong or right way to generate traffic for a blog. If you were analyze the sources of traffic on many top blogs you’d find quite different factors at play!
(Via ProBlogger Blog Tips.)
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