I had a someone ask me how to download and edit Animoto Videos for use on their site. Before I show the video, I want to cover what Animoto‘s Terms of Service (ToS) are for personal and commercial use so no one decides to run me out of town on a rail.*

Animoto Personal Use -

The ToS are pretty clear on personal use. In essence, you can

• download the videos you make,
• use them on your personal site by storing them on your site,
• or have Animoto host them and use their video player.

They do insist, however that if you store it on their site and use their code that you do not modify the video player or video in any way (such as removing their Animoto logo). Here’s the section from the ToS:

You may share your Animoto Videos hosted on the website by using Animoto‘s video player code to play your video in your own personal website or web page. You may also share your Animoto video by downloading it to a storage device, personal computer, or mobile device. The Animoto Videos may only be used for personal, non-commercial, uses. You agree that you will not modify the video player code in any way, nor will you modify the display of your Animoto Video.

So if you want to use the video on a personal site and have Animoto store it, you may not change the way the player is displayed.

Animoto does retain some rights you may want to consider:

You hereby grant to Animoto a royalty-free, perpetual license to use, copy, create, modify, display and host your Animoto Video, Image Content, and Musical Content solely to the extent necessary for Animoto to provide the Services as described herein.

Animoto Commercial Use -

“Ay, there’s the rub.” The commercial restraints are more limited and if you have shallow pockets, they are pretty draconian. If you are a commercial user, you:

• must buy a commercial license for your videos ($39.00 USD a month or $249.00 USD yearly),
• must buy a license for each user (so if you and an employee do videos, you must have two licenses),
• must have a commercial license if you produce and sell videos using Animoto’s services to people who are using the videos commercially,

and the client must have a license for Animoto if you produce a video and they use it commercially.

If you are a videographer that sells videos to others for personal use, then you only require a license for you.

Now having said that, here’s how you can download and Animoto video and make changes to it…

* This was a “quaint” tradition in the early 1800s where some unfortunate individual would be tarred and feathered (painful in and of itself) and then forced to straddle a railroad tie while people carried him/her out of town. This, of course, has nothing to do with Animoto!

WordPress announces today that PHP 4 and mySQL 4 will no longer be supported in versions of WordPress 3.2 and beyond. This will involve few changes as far as end users are concerned and mainly affect older plugins that have not been updated in six months or more.

Only six per cent or less of WordPress users are on on mySQL 4 and only eleven per cent or less are running PHP versions less than 5.2 so for most of us this will be a non-issue. WordPress 3.2, however, will have routines built into the installer that will keep you from upgrading your site(s) if the servers do not meet the installation requirements.

If you are a technically savvy user this will not be a problem. If not, make sure your hosting service meets the new requirements before the start of… 2011!

WordPress 3 has come storming out of the gates to glowing reviews (or with lots of cussing, depending on how successful the website owner was with the upgrade!) I have fortunately been able to stay out of the latter group, despite having to upgrade a couple of production sites which were running betas. That’s the nerd living on the edge in me (but is lots safer than jumping out of airplanes like I used to do for a living for a mere $50 a month jump pay.)

This newest version brings WordPress into the big leagues as a Content Management System (CMS) with the promise and dangers it entails. The new menu system now allows the enduser to structure the flow of a website with little to no assistance from capitalist swine like myself. Users can focus on bringing important points to the fore and emphasizing core products or services without having to add a gazillion lines of code or adding yet another plugin to handle custom menus and slow the system down further.

I came across a short news release yesterday about a new plugin for WordPress that made me scratch my head and say “huh?”

“RTA (Restricted to Adults) was developed by ASACP out of a need for a free, easy-to-use and internationally recognized label that designates content for adults only.

The RTA label is a unique string of meta data, which can be inserted into the computer code of any website. Parental filtering software recognizes the tag and prevents children from viewing adult content. Installing the RTA tag on a WordPress install can be somewhat complicated, so the RTA plugin takes only one click to activate.”

The ASACP is the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection, founded in 1996 and dedicated to reporting and closing sites containing child pornography. This is a worthy goal but I am not convinced that the “RTA” label will be of benefit. The tag relies on two separate things for success:

We just recently got back from a Mediterranean cruise and my wife went out to look for computer replacements . She came home with an iPad. If you have seen my earlier post you’ll notice that I was not a fan of the iPad and I said it was going be as successful as the Newton. Well, I have to admit that I was wrong. In fact, I’m glad to have to say it, since I *was* wrong and we now have two FOUR of them. It’s really a pretty neat little machine and has a lot more uses and has a lot more significance than I thought it would.

I want to start off by talking about the cons with the iPad before I go into the pros.

In the last weeks of May, my family and I went on a Disney Cruise in the Med. We embarked at Barcelona, Spain, and went to Malta, Tunis, Naples,  Civitavecchia, Corsica, and Southern France. Although I have been to central Europe, this was my first trip farther south.

One of the stops we wanted to make was at Pisa to see the leaning tower. Once we got there, I was impressed with the care and maintenance of the location. The leaning tower is lovely, the cathedral a little too baroque for my tastes, but the baptistry was the most striking spot we visited there (now that I’m in my 50s I decided not to climb the stairs on the tower, unlike going up the Stature of Liberty when in my 20s….)

The structure of the baptistry is similar on the inside to the capital building in Washington, DC. Both have a special structure in the top that captures sounds and magnifies them. There is a guard on duty there that tolls the time on the hour and half hour. The balding gentleman in the video is the one doing the chanting. The camera was new to me and so I just barely caught the start of the chant and edited the part out (mostly)  where I had the camera misoriented (just pretend you are at sea….)

I have been using Amazon S3 for my videos for a little over a year now. I think it’s a terrific service and easy to use, if you have the proper tools. I recommend Easy Video Player as one of them.

Download PDF version of Painless-SEO slides.

I discovered, late in the evening on Sunday, a service that was new to me at ArticleVideoRobot (affiliate link). It will take a text article and turn it into a video for you *and* distribute it.  I was getting ready to go to bed but thought, what the heck, I’ll just see what this does. About thirty minutes later, I had a good feel for the capabilities of the program. Very interesting and I’ll post more on it later.

Video follows =>

I was one of those who had Miracle Traffic Bot recommendations flooding my inbox, and so I thought I’d take a chance on it. There were a number of people who I have followed for a while that said it was a great traffic tool and would solve my list building problems and do my laundry and bake bread while it was working away in the background.

I have had this up and running on my machine for a while and I am waiting for the promised refund (I used it for 30 days). At first glance the idea behind this software is appealing – send your material to multiple sites from one location. But there are problems:

1) There are logon issues with a number of the article sites in particular where the system appeared to not be designed properly to successfully log on,

2) You can only have one article in the system at a time, so if you wanted to submit two articles you’d have to clear all of the fields and insert the new article info by hand – there is no option to save what is in the system and start with another article

3) One of the biggest draws is supposed to be the monthly releases of video sites, article sites, and social networks. This month there were 4 article sites added to the system – two of which were ezinearticles and ideamarketers
They sent a Twitter tool in this month’s packet that they claim to have just developed and would be released shortly for bunches of money… in reality it was the IM Buzz Software rebranded (which is how I think they can claim they just “developed” it)

4) Finally, the submission program doesn’t choose the proper categories in the article sites no matter what category you enter in the main program.

In case you might think I am exaggerating, here’s the pertinent bit from their *member’s* page:

Twitter Traffic Robot is a brand new software that was developed only a few days ago.

We are planning to launch this to the public at $67 very soon. But as a premium member you get access to it FREE!

This software is an extremely powerful tool that can be used to get top rankings on search engines for any keyword and boost your brand name.

Here is a comparison of their program and the one I have from IM Buzz Software that I rebranded.

Look at the layout, look at the size of the text in the buttons, look at the ad spaces. Is this a cosmic “co-inkeydink”? I think not.

I’d recommend people stay away from this.