Web Talk

Are you a podcaster releasing tons of podcasts on your blog? If so you may be interested in this nice website letting you create a lot of free podcasts with a nice skin. Blogamp is a web-based application that lets you create your own podcast to put on your blog. Just upload your MP3 file ( which doesn’t have to be bigger than 25MB) on Blogamp’s server and you will get a code to put on your blog right away! Its features include: customise your podcast skin color, track your listenership, add e-commerce and video links, embed or Pop-up player on any site or social network, add your own RSS Feeds. If you want to know more, click on the link to get a full list of Blogamp ’s features.

Have you ever wished to get some business cards to show to your friends or people you come in contact with at work? No, I am not talking about real business cards but electronic cards which, apart from being for free, let you show who you are and other important infos. Retaggr.com lets you have your own private business cards with a few easy steps. The service Retaggr.com offers you goes beyond the simple creation of cards. As a matter of fact, once registered to the website, you will be able to leave your profile card whenever you leave a comment on the internet, show your recent twitter messages, display your online activity, link to your card from anywhere on the web etc. If you are a webmaster instead you can have your personal widget to stick on your Wordpress website, specify content from your site to be shown within Profile Cards, make your content more useful while keeping readers on your site etc. The service is totally  free and it just requires a quick registration.

If you are an icon-freak always looking for new icons to use and download on your computer, or if you are just looking for a nice icon to put on your blog or among the pages of your latest document, then you have got to try this nice website called ICONlook.com. Basically, it is a search engine letting you search for any kind of icon just by typing the keyword of what you want. The icons are available in different format namely 12×12, 16×16, 22×22, 32×32, 48×48, 64×64 and 128×128 and come in .ico and .png format. The icons are “clean” meaning that they don’t contain any watermark or writing of any sort. This lets you use them without any issue or restriction. Anyway, for some of them, there is a kind of copyright which is fully readable on the page you want to download the icon from.

Mutapic is an interesting web utility letting you create, mutate and manipulate pictures online. Reading from the web site: “Mutapic is an online picture generator. It is a free tool you can use to rapidly create original art. Click on the green button to start.” So this online application is not a photo editor, but a wonderful tool almost specifically made for artists who want to create fancy artworks. It can also be used to create logos, icons, patterns, illustrations, and such just for fun. But how does it work? Basically, the main idea behind Mutapic is to blend two different pictures to create a set of new artistic images. Mutapic generates an infinite number of original images and icons using randomness, rules, recipes and elements that are shown as features on its complete palette. Some of its effects include: brightness, contrast, invert, translate, rotate, scale, shadow, gradient noise etc. If you are curious to see some artworks posted by people who have used it, click here. To start mutate your pictures, click here.

Gicks is a website that lets you create animated gifs starting from Flickr pictures, your own pictures or even YouTube videos! To start using it, you don’t even have to sign-up. Just specify where to upload your pictures, what sizes your gif will be (200 pixel with Gickr’s logo, 120, 100, or 50 pixels without Gickr’s logo) and its frame rate. That’s it! Reading from the website: “Gickr.com lets you instantly create Animated GIF online, free, right now! Just upload pictures or grab them from your Flickr. Create funny flashy slideshows with you and your friends, cartoons, previews, banners, etc. Post them anywhere you can post pictures: MySpace, Bebo, HI5 etc. No need for flash. Show them to people in our Gallery.”

This wonderful example of Web 2.0 lets you create new fonts from scratch. In fact FontStruct is a complete online font-building rich of interesting features. FontStruct lets you build your own personal fonts thanks to geometrical shapes arranged in a grid like tiles or bricks. To start using it you need to sign-up. Among its features you can find: FontStructor which is the earth of this application letting you build your fonts, MyFontStruct which is a place where you can store your fonts and the Gallery where people share their fonts. If you want to know more about this website, click here.

This wonderful example of Web 2.0 is called Forvo and it is an online pronouncing dictionary. If you are studying a foreign language, you know only too well how hard it can be to pronounce a certain word fluently. Sometimes you may be at loss with some words because you really don’t know how to pronounce them and the only solution you have got, is to ask for help to your teacher or wait to hear it somewhere. If you are abroad instead and you want to ask the direction of your final destination, how many times have you tried to ask for help to a person along the street, just to find out that you can not say the name of a street or a location correctly? Forvo is meant to solve all these issues! Forvo contains hundreds of short files (around 2,5 sec per file) each containing the exact pronunciation of a certain word. Everyone can upload a word. You can do it anonymously or after a brief registration. So far Forvo contains around 900 different words pronounced in more than 177 different languages!

PhotoShop has just unveiled and made available its PhotoShop Express web-tool. It was about time I dare say! A few years ago a lot of web photo editor tools started appearing on the Internet promising you to do whatever you want with your pictures. There are hundreds of them and I myself have already reviewed some. Now, even though with a huge delay, Photoshop has its own. I ask myself: what was it waiting for? Anyway lets see its main features. First of all let me be straight with you. If you are looking for something like the original Photoshop, then you’d better buy it. Yes, because this online version contains a few features to play with. As a matter of fact this flash based application has just 17 buttons for editing, a thumbnail to preview your modified pictures, 2GB of free space and import (from Picasa,Facebook etc). To start using PhotoShop Express you need to sign-up. If you want you can also have a free try here.