A number of select partners now have the ability to offer paid subscriptions to its users. This announcement isn’t likely to come as any significant surprise for those of you with your hand on the pulse of YouTube monetization. People have been trumpeting for quite some time that YouTube’s partnership program makes the production and distribution of high-quality content a herculean effort at best.

The new program means that paid channels will start appearing on YouTube, each one with a 14-day trial and each one with adjustable fees starting at $0.99 per month to $6.99 per month. Presumably, partners will be able to set and adjust the subscription fees (within reason) as they see fit. Subscribing to a channel will allow a user to watch that channel from any of their devices, including their phone, tablet, PC, or TV. More devices have been promised in the future, as well.

Though only a small collection of channels is going to be running the subscription program at first, Google plans to roll things out on a much broader basis in the near future. As they do this, they’ll be taking feedback from both content creators and users, working to tailor the service to provide a better experience to all.

The categories of the currently enrolled channels are fairly broad and extensive, ranging from Comedy, film, & Entertainment to Music. For creators, the impact this initiative will have on them is clear. A new method of monetization means more money, more money means better content, and better content means more users.

That’s the theory, anyway.

I’m actually not so certain the new initiative is going to pan out all that well. For one, YouTube has traditionally been an entirely free platform. Ad-supported, maybe, but ultimately entirely cost-less to browse, peruse, and upload. To me, it almost feels as though Google may well be trying to make new media fit an old business model.

Just look at the new channels. Few, if any, contain any user-generated content. They’re almost entirely comprised of television shows. This could, it seems, end up as YouTube trying to be something it’s not.

After all, we already have a whole host of subscription TV services available to us. Netflix and Hulu together host pretty much all of the videos most of us will ever need, while many television networks have begun offering their own shows, free of charge, for online streaming. In such an environment, can YouTube’s new offering really survive?

That’s not the only reason I find myself experiencing doubts about the new service. In the current YouTube landscape, it’s common – almost distressingly so – for videos to be downloaded and re-uploaded. Given this fact, is a subscription service really the most viable option? What’s to stop people from simply getting the videos elsewhere, or subscribing then downloading to provide them at another source?

On the one hand, the YouTube subscription model means that we’re going to be seeing some really cool stuff coming out of some of our favorite YouTube channels. Unfortunately, we may with the advent of this model begin seeing pay-walls for some of the best content. Truth be told, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see video piracy services start to spring up if this ends up being the case. That, or people might just start going elsewhere for their video needs.

What do you folks think of the new model? Will it prove viable, or ultimately fall fat? Moreover, will any of you be willing to pay for YouTube videos?

Are you checking in on Foursquare?

And, are you checking in on Facebook? Or, even if you’re not checking in, are you telling the world where you’re located every time you post a status update?

There are security risks with being so public about your location so often. In this video, I talk about those risks. And I also show you how to stop Facebook from posting what city you’re in when you post a standard status update.

Click Here To Watch This Video on Youtube.com

Here’s the golden rule of social media…

If you’re not OK with the world knowing about it, don’t post it on social media. Period.

You do that, you’ve got nothing to worry about when it comes to your social media privacy.

Twitter has, I’ve noticed, undergone something of an evolution since I started using it.

It’s much more than 140-character thought-fragments now. Users frequently share articles, images, long-form musings (through applications such as TweetLonger), and even music and videos. In a sense, the platform has evolved beyond its micro-blogging roots. Unfortunately, the interface has remained relatively constant since Twitter’s inception. While this isn’t necessarily a problem on the PC, this can be something of a pain on a mobile device. This is particularly true if you’re following a large number of people. Sorting through all that content can often seem like more trouble than it’s worth.

Not surprisingly, there’s an app for that.

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Tweetbot. Developed for the iPhone, iPod, and iPad by the folks at Tapbots, Tweetbot bills itself as “a Twitter client with personality.” At first glance, it’s definitely an impressive sight. A recent update has given Tweetbot a rich-media timeline view. Vine, Instagram, and YouTube videos are all displayed right in the stream, with the tweets themselves serving as captions for the content, which can be accessed without having to navigate to another page. The trade-off is that Tweetbot by default omits tweets that don’t include any content outside of text. This feed can be easily toggled on and off at the top of the timeline.

The media-rich newsfeed of Tweetbot isn’t the only thing that’s impressive about it. It also features a function which works in tandem with Twitter’s “lists” feature, allowing for the creation of multiple timelines which can be swapped between at your leisure. If, for example, you’re lounging about at home and you don’t really care to see anything related to work, you can look at your Family or Friends timeline instead of your Co-Workers timeline.

All the basic functionality of Twitter is there, as well, translated masterfully into a mobile format. Swiping to the right, for example, will display the context of whatever tweet you happen to be viewing, while different tap gestures can be set to expand, re-tweet, favorite, reply, or translate a tweet between languages.

Tweetbot is also highly customizable, and the menu bar at the bottom of your feed can be tweaked to your heart’s content. Even better, management of multiple accounts is a breeze. Each account can be custom-tooled with its own personalized settings, and tweeting/re-tweeting from a different account requires nothing more than a simple tap. Admittedly, this is something you should be careful with: the ease with which you can swap between twitter profiles means you could well find yourself sharing something with your colleagues which was meant for your friends.

Tweetbot also includes URL shortening and the ability to seamlessly upload images, links, and videos, in addition to working with several of iOS’s prominent browsing and content consumption apps.

To be honest, there’s only one real problem I can think of with Tweetbot at the moment (though I’ll be spending a bit more time with the application over the coming weeks): it’s not available for Android. Sorry, folks. Unless you have iOS, you’ll have to sit this one out. If you do happen to be using an iPhone, iPad, or iPod to look through your tweets, Tweetbot’s probably one of the best solutions out there. Download it here for iPad, and here for iPhone/iPod.

Like so many other problems, the answer is in an app.

Nextly is one of a growing breed of platforms designed for the easy and efficient exploration and consumption of content online – platforms which, as the amount of information online steadily increases, are becoming more and more desperately required by the end user. Using an exquisite yet simple interface, Nextly makes it possible to browse through posts and updates from a whole array of sources; including Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter coupled with a whole array of other content sources.

Nextly equips you with the ability to organize your content based on source or topic, at which point you can easily skip from one article to the next through the interface. Ironically enough, this leads to an experience which feels somewhat reminiscent of channel surfing. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course: it most definitely streamlines the process of content consumption. Even better, Nextly allows you to instantly share anything you find interesting or relevant through Facebook, Twitter, or Email.

If you find a particularly interesting piece of content and you either want to revisit it later or don’t have time to examine it right away, you can bookmark it within the application. This will make the page accessible from the application’s main menu, allowing you to go back whenever you see fit. Lastly, navigation is streamlined even further by the ability to use the arrow keys on your keyboard to jump from article to article.

The app, though incredibly useful, isn’t necessarily perfect. Sadly, there’s no option quite yet to post something on Reddit, even though the site exists as a content source, and it also doesn’t allow users to add any websites of their own choosing to the content streams. In that way, it falls short of many of the other content platforms currently circulating the net. Given all of its merits, this is a definite shame, and hopefully a minor issue that the developers fix in the very near future.

Still, in spite of its (relatively inconsequential) flaws, Nextly is a powerful, lightweight, and easy-to-use means of sorting through content on the Internet. While plenty of alternatives exist, you could certainly do worse.

Those of you who are interested in giving it a try can check out Nextly here. Signing up is as simple as linking it to your Twitter or Facebook account.

That’s where Priveazy comes in.

Priveazy is a Chrome Extension which is made up of three separate components: a Chrome extension known as Priveazy Lockdown, a web application, and something known as the “Priveazy Classroom.”

The Chrome extension offers a simple, intuitive means of protecting your privacy online. Every time you log in to a website which the extension supports, a red lock will appear in your address bar. Click on it, and it’ll list a few basic steps you need to complete in order to keep yourself protected.

Clicking on any one of the steps will load up the precise page or setting which you need to change in order to ensure your information is protected. As an added bonus, Priveazy actually goes out of its way to avoid violating your privacy itself. it won’t scan your settings when installed, nor will it access any of your information. The trade-off there is that it doesn’t know what settings you’ve already changed or updated, which could be a minor sticking point for some.

The web app, meanwhile, is a little more in-depth than the Chrome extension. It offers a step-by-step guide for each website you’ve got an account on, with a selection of information pertaining to why each setting is important. For each task, you can label it as completed, instruct the app to remind you about it, state that you chose not to do it, or click on “This Didn’t Work.” In the case of the latter, the site will prompt you to explain what happened, and why your efforts failed. Presumably, the app developers will then use this information to improve upon the instructions.

Lastly, the Priveazy Classroom features a series of quizzes to test your knowledge of online privacy, as well as classes which will teach you more about protecting your personal information online.

Essentially, this solution will walk you through ensuring the best privacy online, in a way which anybody can understand.

As privacy solutions go, you could do a lot worse. You can get Priveazy here.

What many people often forget is that it is possible for these popular cloud services to be the perfect avenue for malware delivery.

This unfortunate reality was been underscored by the recent security scare involving Evernote, in which a backdoor malware known as VERNOT.A utilized Evernote as a platform through which data could be collected about an infected system and its user. This data was then relayed back to a Chinese  Evernote account, the owner of which could remotely control the system. It was thought that Evernote was also used as a platform through which stolen data could be distributed, in addition to being the platform through which it could be stolen.

Thankfully, the account to which the malware was set up to deliver was shut down. For the time being, it doesn’t seem like a great deal of damage has been done. Crisis averted, right?

Well…not really.

“This isn’t the first time a public consumer cloud service has been used to communicate with Malware,” notes Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher. “There have been multiple cases of hackers using Twitter to control their botnets, including last year’s Flashback botnet. The malware searched Twitter posts that included IP addresses to use for command and control servers if they lost contact with the last server used. The Makadocs backdoor used Google Docs in much the same way as Vernot used Evernote, acting as a communication channel between infected PCs and the command and control server.”

The problem, explains Trend Micro CEO Raimund Genes at a March question-and-answer session, is that most network administrators don’t pay services such as Dropbox, Evernote, or Box.net much mind. These platforms aren’t generally considered to be potential security risk, and thus they escape the notice and scrutiny of IT professionals. “Nobody’s going to block Dropbox or Box,” said Genes. Worse, he continued, the avenue of distribution isn’t the only areas in which hackers are getting craftier: they’ve also changed the way their malware communicates.

“Many backdoor attacks now do most of their communication among infected systems within the network,” he explained. “This makes it even harder for intrusion detection systems to spot unusual activity, because the uploads appear more like legitimate traffic to those services.”

It’s all more than a little disconcerting, isn’t it? At this point, you’re all likely wondering what you can do to protect yourselves.

To be honest, safe browsing practices still go a long way towards keeping yourself free of malicious code. Given that this isn’t always guaranteed to work, however, you should make sure you don’t store any information that’s too personally identifiable on any cloud platform (at least for the time being).

It may also be prudent to speak to the IT staff at your place of employment, and ensure they’ve some sort of monitoring system in place to track the use of services such as Evernote. If they don’t…push for one.

Un-monitored and un-regulated, Evernote and its ilk could well end up being just one more security risk, regardless of how incredibly useful they are.

Source: Ars Technica

Well, suddenly writing cover letters doesn’t seem so bad, does it?

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to present you with what is quite possibly one of the most valuable tools I’ve ever encountered online. It’s called Répresent: a simple, easy-to-use, incredibly slick resume builder software designed around the idea that no one really likes putting together resumes.

Using this beauty, you can easily cobble together a professional resume that most organizations would be proud to read.

Do note that it’s not going to enter all the data for you. That’s something you’ll have to handle on your own for the time being. I’m sure there’s a tool out there somewhere to pull your information off of Facebook (and various other social networks) so you can use it to create a work document, but for the time being…you’ll need to do the heavy lifting on your own. Répresent just takes care of the difficult part: the aesthetics.

Creation of a résumé first requires a Répresent account. It’s a simple enough process, but it’s worth noting that in the event that you want an avatar on your résumé, it’ll pull an image straight from your Gravatar. Make sure that you sign up for Répresent with the same email address you used for Gravatar if that’s important to you.

Répresent’s resume-designing interface consists of six different sections: About, Experience, Education, Skills, Contact, and Design. The first five are pretty self-explanatory – they’re the core details of any good résumé. The Design section is what we’re going to focus on here. Here, you can customize how the final document is actually going to look. You can select from five different color schemes, and two different templates. It’s not a huge selection, but it should suffice. After all, we’re putting together a résumé, not designing a press portfolio.

One of the first things I noticed about the app (as well as the résumé template) is that everything is designed from a rather minimalist standpoint. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. After all, if your résumé is too flashy or garish, potential employers might well think that it’s because you’re trying to hide your lack of marketable skills (or employability).

Plus, the whole thing is rather elegant in its simplicty. Anyway, once you’re done entering all your information and you’ve chosen a layout you’re satisfied with, simply hit “publish,” and you’ll be presented with the document, which will have its own page and URL (presumably to allow for easy sharing). The final product can be changed by clicking on the “edit” button, then saving your work. Pretty standard stuff.

Anyway, if you’re having trouble giving your résumé the look you want it to have, check out Répresent. It might end up being just waht you’re looking for. My apologies for not nabbing more screenshots, by the way – the server currently seems to be stuck in a redirect loop.

Via Make Use Of

Thankfully, the efficiency that can be afforded by the proper application of technology isn’t lost on everyone. Plenty of applications exist that are designed to boost productivity. We’ve profiled a few of them on PCMech in the past (Evernote is a particular favorite of both mine and David’s).

Today, I’d like to direct your attention at yet one more application designed to make your workday just a little bit easier. It’s a platform known as Wiggio, and it’s been created to make collaboration easier than ever before.

In a lot of ways, it’s similar to a great many collaborative platforms you’ve seen before. Using Wiggio, users can set up schedules and deadlines with one another, host virtual conference calls and online meetings, upload and manage files in a shared folder, set up polls and questionnaires, and (most interestingly) send emails, text, and voice messages straight from the platform. These are probably features you’ve all heard of before. You’ve probably used a suite of apps to serve all these purposes at some point in the past.

What Makes This Different Than All The Others?

Right now, you’re likely wondering what defines Wiggio. What makes it different from the vast array of other tools that already exist?  In short, why should you even bother using it?

For one, it’s centralized everything you need on a single platform. There’s something to be said about the convenience of that:  rather than having to compare notes in Evernote, upload files to DropBox, collaborate on edits in Google Docs and host meetings on Google Hangout, you can do pretty much everything straight from the application’s interface (which is crisp, sharp, and easy to use).

Setting up a group is incredibly easy, and can be done before even completing registration on the site. Once a group is up and running, each member can join in and set up their own profile, complete with all the necessary contact information.

It’s not useful merely in a business context, either. It’s a great platform for clubs, academic groups, sports teams, non-profit organizations, or just a group of friends who wants to better co-ordinate a weekly event (such as a D&D game, perhaps?).

Wiggio is far from the only application out there made with collaboration in mind. It is, however, an incredibly powerful tool, and one which comes highly recommended. If you’re looking to set up a digital workspace in which you can easily communicate with your team, you could do a lot worse.

An absurd idea, isn’t it?

That’s where Songza comes in.  It’s a music streaming service. Though that’s hardly new or unique, it’s got a handy little feature which distinguishes it from pretty much every other streaming service out there: it lets you change what music you hear based on how you’re feeling at the time.

It’s not just about the music you’ll enjoy (which is what most other services seem to focus on). It’s about the music that you need.

When you access the site (and once you’ve signed up), it’ll automatically detect the date and time of wherever you’re signed in. At that point, it’ll suggest a list of five or so probable activities you might be engaged in. These activities change according to day, week, and time. Chances are pretty good that unless you’re a positively bizarre individual whose eccentricities cross into the extreme(or you don’t have a remotely normal sleep schedule), you’ll be able to find something that describes whatever you happen to be doing at the time.

Once you’ve selected an activity, it’ll move you along into the next stage of what the site refers to as its “Concierge” process. It’ll suggest a list of possible genres for you, and you’ll be instructed to select whichever one you enjoy the most. For those of you who aren’t particularly musically inclined, genre includes a small description under the heading. Once you’ve selected a genre, just click on a thumbnail and you’ll be taken to a station. The music will start playing, and you can get on with your day.

You can also look through playlists belonging to similar artists, and access one of those, if you see something that catches your fancy. Again, pretty standard for a streaming service. Concierge is honestly where Songza really shines, it’s what makes the site stand out from the crowd.  That and the fact that you won’t have to put up with any audio ads. That’s pretty awesome too.

Granted, it’s not a perfect service. It’d be nice if you were able to customize things a bit more, but it’s a small quibble with an otherwise excellent app.

You can access Songza here.

In short, keeping all your debts in check can sometimes seem like it’s more trouble than its worth.

Not surprisingly, there’s an app for that. What Do I Owe You is a website that allows you to easily split bills and keep track of existing debts and payments.

The layout is deceptively simple – it starts with two persons by default, and allows you to add a virtually unlimited number of individuals to the list. Once you’ve gotten everyone on record, you can then add a bill to any of the entries.

Let’s try an example calculation. Steve, James, and John are all living in an apartment where the rent is $1250 a month.

We’ll name the first entry “Rent” and then add a bill with a value of 1250. At that point, we add Steve, John, and James. None of them have any bills under their name because we’re trying to calculate a single value. As you can see, it splits the bill evenly. Now let’s see what happens when we add a few more expenses – let’s say Steve pays for the Internet fees, while John covers groceries. Naturally, the two of them will pay slightly less for rent. Again, the calculations are accurate and instantaneous. As you can see, you can add a label to each bill value to keep track of what each bill actually represents.

In addition, What Do I Owe You also allows you to save your progress (tying the session to your browser using a cookie), enabling long-term tracking of your debts and the debts of your friends. If you’re feeling particularly non-confrontational, you can even send an IOU message via email, allowing you to notify your friends that they owe you money without even talking to them. Pretty great, right?

What Do I Owe You also rather sensibly features a mobile site, as well. After all, most people are probably going to be accessing this site when they’re out for dinner and trying to figure out how to accurately split a bill between themselves. Chances are pretty good that they’re not going to have their PCs at hand in such a situation.