Forums are a great way to create a niche community and keep visitors coming back to your site time and time again. Lets face it if your forum is the best forum in XYZ niche then you’ve got the best chance of getting your product or service in front of their face and instantly establishing yourself as an expert in the field. Or even advertising monetization on forums can be good if you have a specific niche to target advertisers in.

But the biggest problem with getting a forum started is a catch 22. You need forum posters to get content on your site but people only want to post on active forums that already have forum posters. So how do you get those first posters to start interacting with your site?

There are a few popular methods I’ve seen:

• Posters for Hire – these guys are the freelancers of the forum posting world. $.20 per post and they’ll go talk about whatever junk you want them to on your forum. But usually this content is not good and often times is copied from other related forums in your industry (bad news if that forum owner catches a pattern of it going on)
• Talking to yourself with multiple accounts – it sounds like a pain in the ass, and it is. You’ll start posting and questions, setting up another account, answering the questions then on another account answering the question. After a while you’ll start getting confused about who the person is your logged in as and… yeah who wants to do this exactly?

Well I’m working on a new idea that I think will be a good 3rd option.

Yahoo Answers has a free API and they allow people to scrape their content (and they don’t even require attribution, they just request it). Well what about using this? They have over 30 million answers+questions in their database. There are posts regarding anything you can imagine.

Any niche forum could be jump started by having new threads and answers pulled from Yahoo Answers on a time delay.

Most of their posts are not promotional spam in the least and yahoo monitors for abuse so using this content seems like a great solution.

Apple was very thoughtful when putting screenshotting abilities in OS X. They included the “Grab” application, which allows you to capture the screen, a selection, or just a window, and then decide what to do with it. But what happens when the window isn’t big enough to capture everything you want, say a screenshot of a full web page. That’s the question I was asking before I started a search and finally came across Paparazzi for OS X. Paparazzi allows you to enter the web address, and dimensions you want for your screenshot. Then all you have to do is hit capture, and you have a full web page screenshot resized to the dimensions you specified.

What were they thinking?

I got a chance to play with an iPhone tonight and I was absolutely blown away. Every last bit of the hype and exposure is warrented. They really raised the bar for future cell phones. Everything works exactly and just as smooth as advertised. But you already know it’s an insanely cool phone, I could go on about the features for pages and pages, but I won’t because you’ve already heard it all.

Here’s what I got to thinking about after I played with it:

Will it ever be available through other carriers? It is now exlusive only to at&t, but will it eventually be carried by T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint? Trying to get a good grasp on this question, I looked to the past. When Motorola was about to launch their new mobile phone star, the RAZR, who did they initially partner with? That’s right, Cingular, which is now at&t wireless. A few months down the road, after all the popularity it was receiving, Motorola started to offer the RAZR through other carriers as well. Soon after the hype and exlusive Cingular offering, we saw T-Mobile get the RAZR, and a few months later verizon had it. Will this happen with the iPhone? Supposedly Apple and at&t have a five year contract, but there hasn’t been an official word on it yet. There was also a previous rumor that the contract with at&t was only through 2008, so who knows. Regardless, to get a heavy marketshare of the mobile phone market, I think Apple has to offer it under the other carriers. I just thought it was worth thinking about. I will probably be switching from T-Mobile to at&t soon anyways, it’s too cool of a gadget not to have, even with the high pricetag that I really can’t afford. Speaking of, is anyone interested in advertising on Jetpacked?

Jetspinner has recently undergone some great upgrades.  As the first and most advanced free article spinner, all the previous features such as random ordering, data merging, random selection, automatic linking, multiple format selection, and zip file downloads are still included, but now our AJAX thesaurus is in Beta testing for all Jetspinner members. 

  Simply click “Activate AJAX Thesaurus” then start typing a section of syntax, such as: “{test|”  – the thesaurus will automatically be triggered and will pull down a list of related words from our database of 33,000 root words and 2.2 million related words.  Play around with it and send your feed back and ideas to us through JetpackedSupport.com, New Ideas category.

Also consider using Jetsubmitter to submit each of your spun variations from Jetspinner to a unique article directory on complete autopiolit.  There is now a 100% automated account creation system (complete with link activation), advanced error reporting, realtime progress spying, 200+ categories, and more.

For those of you who are looking for a reasonably priced, less advanced image and photo editor for Apple OS X, and don’t want to fork out the money for Adobe Photoshop, check out the upcoming Pixelmator. Like photoshop it is a layer based image editor, and has a full set of instruments and tools for, selecting, painting, retouching, typing, analyzing colors, cropping, and transforming. It doesn’t stop there, it will also come with over 50 filters to add those special effects to your images, color correction tools and an absolutely breathtaking user-interface. Be on the lookout for this promising application.