Kodak Playsport and the NEW Kodak ZM1

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Well, life does throw up some amazing coincidences and one of those is finding the Kodak Playsort and the new Kodak ZM1!

Some of you will have seen me raving about my Kodak Zi8 that I bought a while back to get into the whole world of video marketing. It’s still going strong, but that’s not the reason for this update.

I was looking at all the other possibilities in the pocket camcorder space for something I could take on the beach on my upcoming vacation without worrying about sun, sea and sand ruining it and there staring me in the face was the Kodak Playsport.

The Playsport has all the sexy HD goodness of my Zi8 but with 3 metres (10ft) more water resistance! Ideal for a bit of snorkelling or “oops, I dropped the camera”. The only thing it’s missing is the separate microphone input but as I couldn’t find a waterproof lavalier mic anyway it doesn’t make any difference.

As usual I reckon one of the cheapest places to get hold of it is Amazon, so if you want one in the US, check out:

http://amzn.to/PlaysportUS

and of course in the UK:

http://amzn.to/PlaysportUK

Now normally that would be the end of it, job done, camera bought. However, in their cleverness, Kodak intercepted my post and sent me an email this morning about their super new toy….the Kodak Mini Video Camera also known as the Kodak ZM1.

Now, let’s be clear, the ZM1 is NOT an HD camera in any shape or form. It’s maximum res is only 640×480 (ah, the good old days of VGA!) and if you want 60fps then you’ll even have to drop back to 320×240 or QVGA. However, and this is the real kicker….it is literally the size of a credit card (and maybe as thick as a pencil), it’s less than half the price of the Playsport and it is as waterproof as the Playsport. It takes microSD/SDHC memory so you should be able to ride the phone memory wave there too.

I love my Zi8 and I like the HD of the Playsport but this just oozes so much gadgetyness, if that’s a word, that I may just skip straight to the ZM1……even better, Amazon UK have stolen a short lead on the US and have it up for pre-order for August 1 already! Choose your colour here -> Kodak ZM1

Hot Keyword Suggest Tool

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Just a quick tool update for everyone – strangely about a tool that I was thinking of writing myself.

I don’t know if you have seen a couple of videos recently about how Google’s suggest tool actually has a whole load of keywords in it that never get exposed through the adwords keyword tool. If not, here’s a quick experiment. Go to Google and type in a keyword of your choice. As you type, take a look at what the suggest tool offers you.

Now, just add a space and then the letter “a” – so you have “keyword a” in the search box. Hopefully you’ll see a whole load more suggestions from Google. You can walk through the alphabet and get more and more keywords like this and if you go back to the adwords keyword tool, you will probably find that a whole load of them are missing from that tool’s results.

I thought it would be cool to automate the whole process and was just working out the details (elance here we come) when someone sent me an email selling a tool to do exactly that. Can’t remember, I think it was $67 or more. Anyway, I had other things to do and missed the offer.

That was last week and then suddenly today I got a message from Chris Egan who wrote the Hot Keyword Agent software, that he has created a similar tool of his own. I’ve been using the other tool for a while now, and since his was only $27, I have jumped on it like a shot (and saved $40 along the way – love it!).

If you want to check out the Hot Keyword Suggest Tool and the video Chris has made, you can find it here.