mip's scan

2D Animation For Kids

I was watching my 8 year old work on the computer this morning.  She's been through my Youth Technology Camp program and loved the animation streams I taught.  She uses a tool called MOHO from Lost Marble and has created some great 2D cartoon animations on her PC.  What caught my attention this morning was a new software application from Lost Marble that she was using in conjunction with MOHO.

Papagayo is a lip-syncing program designed to help you line up phonemes (mouth shapes) with the actual recorded sound of actors speaking. Papagayo makes it easy to lip sync animated characters by making the process very simple - just type in the words being spoken (or copy/paste them from the animation's script), then drag the words on top of the sound's waveform until they line up with the proper sounds.

It's amazing to see what kids can do with their computers - they seem to just think differently about how to use them.  If you want something for your kids to do on your home PC instead of just surfing the web, chatting on Messenger or playing games then click here to check out Papagayo.  Remember, you need to download MOHO first.

mip's midweek update podcast

Hi everyone and Happy Holidays!

I hope your holidays have been going well.  Due to the holidays this podcast is shorter than most but still filled with all kinds of mip scan info!  Here is this week's show where we cover items like:

• LibriVox
• Name Your Tune
• Firefox Extensions

To download today's show, just click on the link Download midweek_update_dec28.mp3 or you can subscribe to us in iTunes!

Performacing - Another Great Firefox Extension

If you haven't used Firefox yet, make it your 2006 New Years resolution ok.  I mean you can make resolutions like "I'm going to work out at the gym" or "I'm going to diet." but by February you'll have broken your resolution right?  I know I always do! <smile>.

Firefox extensions are awesome and another good one is Performancing.  This is dream extension for anyone who blogs.  From their site they describe Performacing as

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

In my own words Performacing is simply the easiest way to post to your blog if you are an avid researcher and/or reader of online content.  As I read something of interest I just tap the little pen/paper icon they've added to the bottom right side of my screen and up comes a great little on screen editor that posts right to my blog. 

In a word: awesome.

Going Beyond a Hyperlink: Here Comes Hyperwords

It's nice to be off during the holidays.  It gives me a chance to spend time with family and friends.  It also gives me the chance to set things up on my test machines and play with new tech.  Yesterday I came across a great plug-in for Firefox.  It's called Hyperwords and what it does is it gives you freedom to interact with a web page beyond hyperlinks.  They position it like this.  A hyperlink is something you can click on that a web developer has decided to allow you to click - a hyperword allows you to click on any word you want. 

Today we can navigate the web through the routes others have chosen for us: through web-links. Hyperwords™ allow you to interact with all the words on the web.

It's easy: With the Hyperwords™ Firefox plug-in installed, just select any text and a menu will automatically appear. You can search all the major search engines, look things up in reference sites, check dictionary definitions and much more.

This allows the web to become more of a personalized experience.  It also continues to demonstrate the beauty of what Firefox has set into motion by allowing people to freely develop extensions and plug-ins for their browser.  Check out hyperwords here.

To join the public beta you have to send them an email.

Couchsurfing!

My wife loves to travel.  When not actually traveling she enjoys reading about travel.  So of course was I intrigued when she said "This is a cool website."  Travel and technology!  The site in question is Couchsurfing.com which in their own words is

CouchSurfing.com helps you make connections worldwide. You can use the network to meet people and then go and surf other members' couches! When you surf a couch, you are a guest at someone's house. They will provide you with some sort of accommodation, a penthouse apartment or maybe a back yard to pitch your tent in. Stays can be as short as a cup of coffee, a night or two, or even a few months or more. When you offer your couch, you have complete control of who visits. The possibilities are endless and completely up to you.

I liked this from a tech perspective because it demonstrates the power of social networks.  Is it the way to plan a family vacation?  No.  But it feels a niche and it allows for a social network around common interest to evolve.  With over 43,000 couchsurfers and over 17,000 successful surfs it would seem that this type of social network does interest people.  In my book I like - better to be a couchsurfer than a couch potatoe!

Podcaster News

For those of you who listen to my podcast you heard my special announcement that I was now also producing a 5 minute daily show over at Podcaster News (PCN).  I just put out the last episode of the week and thought I'd blog a bit about the experience now that I've got 4 shows released. 

First off, I love what they are doing in terms of creating such a thing as PCN.  I like being able to subscribe to an entire category like Science & Tech or be able to just pick a single stream and subscribe to it.  I reminds me of what Matt Thompson spoke about two podcasts ago with regard to being able to turn on or turn off parts of a podcast.  To me, PCN is one giant podcast put together by a lot of talented people and you can simply switch on or off the parts you want. 

As for my daily show, Leading Edge Technology, I'm enjoying creating the spots.  In some sense its easy because you only need to create 5 minutes worth of content.  On the other hand, I do find it harder as well because of the 5 minute target time - I have to be much more focused on what I'm saying and watch the clock.

What I miss is the feedback loop.  Here on mip's scan, when I blog or podcast, my readers and listeners can comment and that adds to the richness of the discussion.  I'm hoping that PCN will introduce this feature as well.

So four episodes into and I'm really enjoying being a part of Podcaster News.  If you haven't check it out you should and let me know what you think.

V4S - VoiceMail-4-Skype

I spoke about this in my most recent podcast and thught I should post here as well for those readers who only read.  And its very cool stuff as well!

I came across this application from Orb that once download (for free I might add) you are able to have unanswered Skype calls go to voicemail.  This voicemail can be retrieved from any browser.  Now that's cool.  You can get V4S by clicking here, retrieve your message by logging in here.  If you haven't got Skype, be sure to get that first; you can grab that from their site.

mip's midweek update

Welcome to today's show and its an info packed one for sure.  Lots of exciting things are looked at in today's show some of them being:

• Typepad Outage
• RSS2PDF
• Mobile Gmail
• AJAX Web Applications
• Voice Mail for Skype (V4S)
• Podcasternews Network
• Links to My New Show

To download today's show just click here on the link Download mips_midweek_update_december_21.mp3 or subscribe to us in iTunes.

Blinkx TV

I was recently talking about the search tool Blinkx to one of our readers and he blogged about it as he tested it out.  So then blinkx was on my mind for the past week or so and I went and did some re-exploring and wow! was I impressed with a little something I found.

Enter blinkx.tv a search engine that lets you search through a million hours of TV and video.  So I gave it a little spin.  I keyed in King Kong since Peter Jackson's smash hit was on my mind and I got a whole list of results that I've capture in the screen capture to the right (click it to make it bigger).  Take special note of those little orange buttons in the top right of the screen.  Yup - that's right...an RSS Feed, an iTunes or Atom Feed.  That means you can subscribe to this search as a channel - anytime there is anything new in terms of new video content and it'll show up in your RSS Reader or in iTunes.  Now I just have to see if I can get this onto an iPod or not?!?

Protopage

I'm intrigued by this whole "desktop-online" type of service that has been emerging.  I'd looked and posted about one called Goowy a while back.  It's very slick and developed in Flash.  I was now looking at another implementation that leverages AJAX and it is called Protopage. 

What I like about Protopage is that it quickly loads and yet still provides a flexible interface.  Since it leverages AJAX this is exactly the type of desktop that someone like Google could build, launch and deploy and have it well integrated into Gmail for example. 

If you try it out for yourself, select the personalize option and you can create your own custom online destop.  I created additional panels that allowed my to integrate RSS feeds for popular blogs that I read.

Let me know what you think of this emerging trend.