Make Funny Collages Online with FancyPix

I am occasionally checking the popularity of my posts to understand what is drawing the biggest public interest on this blog. One topic, which has the obvious leadership in amount of the unique visitors, is the funny online image editors. When I need to prepare fast fresh collage or greeting card, I am frequently use these service myself, so I can share this fascination of what can you do with your own picture with no slight experience with graphic editing, and in matter of minutes. Developed technology helps to improve the quality and speed of picture rendering, and multiple competing sites drive the developers’ efforts to offer fresh insight and new backgrounds.

Today, I would like to present FancyPix, one of the sites, offering you funny collage making opportunities. Authors present about 100 standard templates you can use for the picture modification, including animated themes; several advanced tools, like butterfly on the picture or animated text; section, featuring magazine covers; and about 50 face recognition templates.

While the variety of the standard templates is not outstanding, the picture operation is simple and gives several features, not available on some other sites: you can easily crop, rotate, and resize the image to choose the suitable scene to be inserted. Two examples:

The face recognition section also offers some nice opportunities for the original image manipulation: you can drag, resize, and rotate you photo. You can also adjust brightness, contrast, hue and saturation to make your photo look more authentic. Here are two examples. They are not perfect, but I did not spend more than one minute for each of these experiments.

You may want to register for the site to save your creations online, but that is totally optional, since you can always save the resulting images to your Hard Drive. One more good thing, I can say about the service – when you load your picture, it will be preserved in site memory, so you can try multiple effects without its reloading, which saves time significantly.

Website: http://www.fancypix.com/

If you like FancyPix, you may like the similar sites as well:

• Photofunia
• Deefunia
• Dumpr
• FunPhotoBox
• JPGFun
• Photo505
• FunnyWOW
• PicJoke

How to create your own Internet Radio Station?

Who needs the Internet Radio Station?

• Artists, who would like to promote their audio tracks among their friends and general public.
• Website and blog owners, who would like to publish the favorite songs, related to the particular posts.
• Music fans, who want to have instant access to their music library and be able to share it with their friends.

If you belong to one of these categories, you might be interesting in promising free service, called Radionomy. Radionomy is a web platform hosting personal internet radios with no charges.

Radionomy provides individuals and organizations with the tools, infrastructure, and content libraries to create real radio stations broadcasted on the web and accessible anywhere. It's now the biggest webradio network in Europe, with more than 3000 internet radio stations spreading over all kinds of music genres and cultures.

The name Radionomy comes from two concepts: Radio + Autonomy.

The developers believe that today’s Internet users should be completely free to create their own radio stations. Freedom of choice: they provide track libraries and lots of audio content. Freedom of expression: the ability to add content at will. Financial freedom: they pay for everything including royalties and broadcast fees.

Developing your own station is fast and easy. You need to create an account and register the new station name. When you create a radio, it will automatically be registered on your portal of radios with the address www.radionomy.com/yourradioname. Then you download the free software to manage your audio tracks library.

After your station is published, all visitors of the Radionomy website will be able to listen to the Radios proposed by the creators of radios by connecting directly to the radio address, by searching for a radio using multiple criteria or by following the selections proposed by the Radionomy team (top-ranking radios, new ones, etc.). You can send the URL created by Radionomy to your friends, or embed it to your website or blog with provided code.

Note that Radionomy broadcasts radio in streaming. The auditors can listen to a radio but without being able to download all or part of what is being broadcast.

Try it at http://www.radionomy.com/en#

ICANN supports unlimited imagination in choosing Top-Level Domains

The Board of ICANN, which controls top-level domains and Internet connectivity, has voted to allow for expansion of new top-level domains (TLDs) to include an almost unlimited number of broad, unlimited strings as new dots, including "almost any word in any language" and even using Facebook Emoticons like musical notes.

That is going to versify enormously the web addresses structure, as currently there are only 22 TLDs, giving amazing chance to improve branding opportunities. But… not for everyone!

 A factsheet released by ICANN says the evaluation fee is approximately $185,000 and applicants will have to pay a $5,000 deposit per requested application slot when registering. ICANN says the fee is set to recover costs associated with the program to ensure it is fully funded and revenue neutral. According to the application guidebook, "this deposit amount will be credited against the evaluation fee for each application. The deposit requirement is in place to help reduce the risk of frivolous access to the online application system."

Also, the application form will be quite complicated and is expected to be 360 pages long.

So brands like Coca-Cola could ask to create “.cola” or “.coke” and Intel might request “.intel” TLD. That would be almost personal domain, but the biggest interest might be in getting attractive generic TLDs, like “.cafe”, “.bank”, or “.store”.

“ICANN has opened the Internet’s naming system to unleash the global human imagination," Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive officer of ICANN said in a statement. "Today’s decision respects the rights of groups to create new Top Level Domains in any language or script. We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind."

Just reminding to all blog readers, that three months ago, ICANN approved new specific top-level domain “. XXX” for sites with pornographic content after long, full of controversy, debates.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.rev2.org/2011/06/20/icann-aproves-new-top-level-domains/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/20/icann-domains-expansion-annnounced