I had a question a few days ago from Debbie Bohanan, asking me if I knew of any ways to turn a photo into a cartoon. There are plenty of ways to add thought bubbles (like ToonDoo), but not many ways to take a normal digital photo and cartoon-ify it. I’d heard that BeFunky.com was supposed to handle that and even go well beyond. A blurb on the website said that it would even take a video of yours and turn it into a cartoon! So, I added myself to the wait list to see if I could get into the private beta that’s going on. A few days later and I was past the velvet rope.
There’s two parts of BeFunky, the Uvatar and Cartoonizer. I really don’t have much to say about the Uvatar part short of it’s the usual Web 2.0 paper doll creator with plenty of choices and nothing else notable about it. In theory you could pay them to create a custom one for you, but I saw some messages on the discussion boards saying that people weren’t receiving the ones they’d paid for. However, Cartoonizer definitely captured my attention.
The idea is simple. You upload a photo. First it sketches out the hard lines. Then it fills in sections with blocks of color. Then you can warp it manually if you like. The end result is a VERY accurate cartoon based on the photo. That’s the good. The bad is that it’s slow. Every step takes about 5-10 seconds. Make a change and wait. Tweak the slider and wait. Crop the image and then waaaaaiiiiiitttttt. But that being said, the only other way to get that sort of effect that I know of is to do some pretty fancy photoshop work. First easy and online way to do this sort of thing that I know of.
One other note. When it comes to getting your cartoon out of BeFunky, the site makes it clear that it plays well with others. It’ll give you TONS of custom embed codes for everything from Wordpress to Twitter to del.icio.us to several I’ve never heard of (what the heck is TailRank?). So it definitely gets bonus points for that.
Next on my to do list: Take my BeFunky cartoon and Blabberize it! Blog post forthcoming…
Click images to see them full size.
Original image of the infamous ‘California Backscratcher’
We all know there’s good stuff in YouTube and Google Video. People have created some amazing videos, but sometimes it’s just a bit challenging finding the good stuff. You know, the stuff that’s actually… what’s the word I’m looking for? FACTUAL. I mean, I could make a video about what happened during the Civil War, but that doesn’t mean the stuff I include actually happened!
Enter ScienceHack.com. As it says right above the search bar, “Every science video on ScienceHack is screened by a scientist to verify its accuracy and quality.” I do have some reservations about how high the quality is on some of their videos (such as this one of somebody solving a Rubik’s Cube underwater). But they balance that one off with videos about Electronegativity, and the Ionic Bond. While high quality, these videos seem to emit a stench of copyright violation. They certainly don’t look user generated.
Then you finally get what looks to me like genuine user generated videos that are actually educational. For example, the video below is community created video that demonstrates how much sugar is actually in a can of soda. Very cool, and the type of video I’d like to see more of. And after watching the video, I think I may pass on that Diet Coke today.
Posted on December 4, 2007 in Uncategorized by admin
This isn’t the most complicated Web2.0 tool, nor is it the shiniest, but it does exactly what it claims to do in a nice straightforward fashion.
Submit some text into vozMe and it’ll convert it to an MP3 so you can hear it read aloud. Couldn’t be easier. Gravitate to Spanish or Italian? It’s supporting those two languages right now as well.
What’s really nice though is that you can download a Wordpress Plugin, insert in a Blogger Widget, or embed it in any number of other ways. You can even allow a user to select a portion of text and then click a button to hear it read aloud.
Fantastic for ESL students and students who have any sort of literacy issues. Also great for taking long blog posts on the road with you to listen to in the car.
I’m still waiting for a free site that does the inverse, translates your voice into text. There are plenty of pay services that do it, but haven’t seen a free one yet! Keep your eyes open for me
If you’re using your STAR DEN blog, is this a plugin that you might be interested in?
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