Some Useful Live Blogging Tools

Live Blogging has been a good source to drive attention and thus traffic to your blog. In past people used to live blog by simply editing their so-called live-blog posts again and again. This was obviously a hectic and non efficient method. As you may have seen that I have been live blogging at different events e.g at Seminar on Usability and Islamabad Bloggers Meet up. In my method, people attending the live blogs see the updates in a dynamic manner and can also comment and participate in it. Also there are services available which let you broadcast a live video stream of any event on your blog. Here are some tools which you can use for text and video live-blogging.

1) Cover It Live:

Cover It live is the most popular tool for live blogging and is completely free to use. All you have to do is to create an account at coveritlive.com, create an event and add the generated code to the HTML of your live-blog page. The live blog window will appear immediately at the relevant place. You can invite people to the live-blog by entering their email addresses. Multiple Twitter accounts and multiple authors can also be added.

2) Justin.tv

This is a tool for live-video streaming. All you have to do is to create an account and an event at www.justin.tv, attach a webcam to your laptop and start the live streaming.

3) Qik.com

Qik is a very useful tool that lets you broadcast the live video right from your cell phone as you can see here. If you don't have a laptop or a wi-fi connection, you can benefit from it. Picture quality totally depends upon your cell phone camera. Simply create an account at www.Qik.com, download a tiny software for your mobile and start live-streaming. You can also embed this video in your blog by pasting the embed code available. As I have done here:

Arrange a LAN Party to have a fun!

A lan party is a very simple and interesting way of recreation. In a LAN party friends come up at a common place with their Laptops or desktop computers, connect them together in a LAN (Local Area Network) and share whatever they want. The most common purpose of a LAN party is to play the games. However you can arrange a LAN party for your homework, data sharing or any other purpose. Here I will tell that how to arrange a LAN party in a simplest way.
Requirements:
1) Any number of Laptop or desktop computers (I assume that you have pre-installed windows XP and LAN cards on all of them)
2) Straight Cables (Click Here for detail)
3) A LAN switch (The number of ports on the switch must be equal or more than the number of computers)

Step-by-Step:
1) Arrange the computers in such a way that the switch is in a central location (so that the cables might be accessible from all computers)
2) Connect each computer with the switch through the Straight Cables.
3) Turn on all the computers and the switch.
4) Configure the network
a. Go to the desktop of 1st computer
b. Right click on ‘My Computer’ icon and click on Properties
c. Click on ‘Computer Name’ Tab from the new window
d. Click on the ‘Change…’ button and another window is opened
e. Give the Computer Name (e.g. Ahmad’s Computer). It should be unique for each computer.
f. Now choose the ‘Workgroup:’ radio button and enter the name of your network e.g. OfficeNetwork. Press 'OK'.
g. Right Click on 'My Network Places' and click on 'Properties'
h. A new window is opened. Right Click on 'Local Area Connection' and click on 'Properties'
i. Choose 'Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)' from the newly opened window and click on properties.
j. Choose 'Use the following IP address:' radio button from the newly opened window.
k. Enter '192.168.12.5' in the 'IP address:'. Subnet mask will automatically change. Leave all the other fields blank.
l. Click 'OK'.
m. Repeat the steps (b) through (l) on each computer but make sure to enter a series of IP addresses. i.e 192.168.12.6 for second computer, 192.168.12.7 for third computer and so on. Also make sure that the computer name (defined in step 'e') should be unique for each computer and the workgroup name (defined in step 'f') should be the same for each computer.

Restart each computer and your network is ready to work. Install your favourite multiplayer game on each of them to enjoy the LAN party!

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Download Youtube Videos Without Any Hassle

Youtube is the most popular video sharing website around the globe. You watch a lot of videos that you wish to download from Youtube for offline viewing. There are many websites offering this functionality but most of them are not very efficient. There are a lot of problems with them e.g. you have to wait a long for a download, no "Pause" function is available, you cannot download several videos simultaneously, you require to convert the video format to view it in your favorite media player etc.

Here I am going to mention a simple way to download Youtube videos. There are lot of videos on the web to download other than Youtube so you will not only be able to download videos for free from Youtube but also from other websites e.g Metacafe.com, Qik.com, Justin.tv or any other.
All you have to do is to download Realplayer 11 or higher for free (Click here to Download Now), install it on your PC and you are done! Just go to the website you want to download a video from, rollover the mouse on the video, a button will automatically appear with the text "Download This Video". Click this button to start the video download.
You can download multiple videos simultaneously and the pause functionality is also available. There's no need to convert the video to any other format, just go to the "Media library" of Realplayer and then choose "Downloads and Recordings" for a playback!

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