OpenSource Textbooks?

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Flat World Knowledge for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

This is one of the coolest things I have seen in a while. If you attend a university or college you know that tuition and textbooks keep getting more expensive. Sometimes this causes instructors to try to pick a cheaper book over a better but more expensive one, or to cut down the number of books for a course because of expense. They are trying to help their students but it is hard not to wonder if they are sacrificing the future for help now. A solution would be a revolution in text book publishing and access.

That solution is Flat World Knowledge. It’s an open license publisher that allows publication of licensed texts to a web server that students can access but that protects the copyright of the author.

Along with it’s open licensing approach Flat World Knowledge has implemented a textbook personalization and rendering tool, change the textbook from a boring object to a living, dynamic learning platform. You get professionally published textbooks published under a Creative Commons open license, transferring legal control to faculty.
Flat World’s breakthrough “Make It Your Own” (MIYO) Platform enables faculty to drag and drop chapters and sections to reorder the book, delete material, edit anything in the book down to the sentence level, and insert new content including audio and video multi-media from sources like YouTube and BlipTV.
Flat World’s open licensing and textbook customization with a radical pricing model gives a formula for disrupting an $8.5bil U.S. textbook market. Books are free online, while offline books cost around $35 for print, and $25 for other formats. For the first time, students can choose the format and price point best for them
I truly believe that this is the future of text books. The expense of books is mostly from the publishers and the giant and expensive printing operations that are required. They have raised over $27mil over the last 2 years in venture capital from investors including Bessemer and BDMI, so I’m not the only one that believes in them. Flat World Knowledge gives the students access inexpensively and gets the profits to the author instead of the publisher. You should get all your instructors to check it out.

Switching OS's Again

Well recently I've switched from Linux to Mac. Gasp. It's actually not too bad, and if you want to do any iPhone or iPad development you have to have so I figured I might as well get used to it. I have to say OS X is probably the nicest OS I've ever used. I find I don't need to customize much, as the default stuff works just like I want it to.
So hopefully I'll be posting a lot more stuff on the following topics:

• iPad programming
• MonoTouch
• MonoMac
• MonoDroid

And maybe some other misc stuff. More updates coming soon.

Affiliate Marketing

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of ClickBooth. All opinions are 100% mine.

I've been reading a lot about affiliate marketing lately and I think it's a subject that's gotten a pretty bad rap of late. Besides, who doesn't use Adblock nowadays anyway you might say, but in my experience as an IT Technician I can tell you, not a lot of people know of or use Adblock. I've seen a few sites that won't let you browse them if you have Adblock on, but those are very few and usually crappy anyway.

The truth is there's a pretty good amount of money to be made in Affiliate Marketing if you've got a good site, with a fair amount of traffic. The latter is probably more important than the former. Once you have those two though you need a descent Affiliate program membership, and that's where Clickbooth CPC comes in.

It's pretty easy to join, and rated the #1 Affiliate Network in the World by Website Magazine. A lot of Affiliate programs I've used all have pretty much the same offers, but Clickbooth actually has exclusive stuff that the others don't, and the payouts are awesome. They have tools on their site to help you create your campaigns and ads, and if you run WordPress it's stupidly easy to add the content to your site.

Most of the other Affiliate Networks I've used have some kind of rep you can email if you need to, but Clickbooth has 24/7 tech support. As far as I can see Clickbooth is one of the major networks out there that will provide this additional service to their publishers, providing more diversity. We're not talking porn banners here people, they have Dish Network, Gevalia, and other real, reputable company's so Google AdWords, Meet Your Competition: Clickbooth

Online Education

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of 2tor. All opinions are 100% mine.

I've been reading The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler lately, and in it he says that every good programmer should spend some time teaching. He say's this helps you identify common misconceptions, problems, and to think in new ways

In my last job as an IT guy at a local Public Broadcasting Station, pretty much all I did was teach our volunteers (generally elderly women) how to use word, excel, and the Internet. It sounds terrible I know, but actually I really enjoyed it. One lady told me about the old days when she used to work on a teletype and it blew me away. Lately I've been examining other career options and I thought perhaps teaching wouldn't be too bad actually. I think I had a knack for breaking complicated things down into smaller easier to manage problems (a thing programmers have to do).

Now I definitely don't have time to go to an actual university, so I've been looking at online options. This led me to USC Rossier School of Education’s MAT@USC, which seems to be one of the better online schools that offer a masters in teaching online. They've been around for over a hundred years and have been ranked #22 in the USA and #9 among all private US universities by US News and World Report and were recently award the AACTE for innovative use of technology in education.

If you look at the video it totally blows my brothers online classes at a local university here in Northern California away, check it out below.

So if you're looking to earn your Teaching Degree Online, I highly recommend you check out The USC Rossier School of Education’s MAT@USC.

program information

MyTies for iPhone

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of MyTies. All opinions are 100% mine.

I was talking to a friend recently about social networks and stuff, and how on facebook you don't have a lot of control for grouping or controlling who can see your posts. He told me about an iPhone app called MyTies.com which seems to address these issues, and with the recent facebook security issues not a moment too soon. It's ideal for people that want to have co workers and friends/family on their social network but want to control who see's what. Obviously you don't want your boss to see your post about how much you drank last night or things like that and with MyTies.com you have that kind of control. You can create multiple groups that you can share text messages, photos, and videos with. It's also optimized for small screens like the iPhone, and the app is simple to use and well laid out, so you could probably teach your mom to use it. Hopefully they'll port it to Android, but for now you can download it free on the iPhone app store and if you use the code myprivacy when you sign up you can get 20 more invites for friends and family for free.