Web News Cocktail » Tutorial

10 sites to create your free online avatar

marothro — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:15:34 +0000

Faceyourmanga.com

You will be able to nearly reach your physical appearance on this Avatar Creator. The options are numerous so you can play a lot with colours and outfits, so to be able to create a quite unique Avatar.

Simpson Avatar

Create a Simpson Avatar online is just very easy as most of the online avatar creation. You choose the person you want to look alike, then choose the necessary features (hair, colour, mouth) and some outfits to finish your avatar. This one doesn’t really reach you real appearance.

Lego

This one is also very funny. The only missing outfit is the hat, otherwise you would not be able to look as a lego. Anyway I tried my best to look alike in real life and the result is not to bad.

Illustmaker.abi-station.com

On this site you car reach an avatar which is very similar to your real face. Ok, you’ll look a little bit Asian . This site is the richest in terms of option and if you spend a time playing with your avatar, you’ll be able to have a nice result, although I didn’t find the right color form my hat!

Buildyourwildself

This one is wild, fun and ultra rapid. The result is unique, but you won’t really look like in your real life.

Osoq.com

Osoq gives you the animated gif feature and if you don’t mind puting a little bit on weight on your avatar.

Quickflashgames.com

This site gives you an avatar in less that 10 seconds. This avatar maker is mainly used to create avatar for online games

befunky.com

On this site , you’ll be able to create you avatar from you own picture, this is the fun of it.

sp-studio.de

Another style quite complete as well with very friendly user interface

doppelme.com

This one also will give you a body avatar, not very complete in terms of features. I didn’t find my glasses.

I hope you’ll find the avatar of your dream with this selection. If you use other avatar online creators, please drop me a line.

Filter anything you want with twitter and pipe.yahoo

marothro — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:24:29 +0000

I am not very fan of twitter yet. But I’ve had a thorough look at it recently and made a few (but not new) discoveries.

search.twitter.com engine

First you can start searching for twitts search.twitter.com engine

twemes.com

Twemes makes you find twitts with hastags. What is a hashtag? It is just a convention between twitting people who wants to enhance on particular word in their twitt, hence putting the # before each word they want to insist upon. Like #obama. Check the site http://www.hashtags.org/ which gives you the real time trends for words. This is very clever.

tweetscan.com

Tweetscan is the same as search.twitter but getting the twitts from another microblogging plateform http://identi.ca une

With these 3 search engines you will get the most of the world twitts. But the best would be to bundle them up in a single RSS feed and make sure that you filter any type of word you want without the need to do it thrice!

So I created for my own use an RSS feed from pipe.yahoo to do the job. You only have to type the word you want to scan and that’s it. It is called twittermonitor?. You can clone it and change it according to your needs and communicate it to your friends. You can also add other twits platform to be sure you don’t miss your keyword.

Pipe Yahoo : How to find the right information through the internet maze

marothro — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:54:40 +0000

If you are looking for information about microblogging, you can easily type this word in google web search, and will get a massive flow off information about microblogging. However, if you want to be updated in real time this is not the right way to proceed.

In this article, I give you a way to perform technological scanning through the tags you can fin on blogs and then get them bundled together through a real time RSS flow.

Let us check the RSS structure of a few diggs and portals offering RSS feed on tags. (you may change microblogging to you favorite tag)

delicious: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/microblogging
technorati (français) : http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/microblogging?authority=a4&language=fr
technorati anglais : http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/microblogging?authority=a4&language=en
Digg : http://digg.com/rss_search?search=microblogging&area=&type=&age=
Google : http://news.google.com/news?q=microblogging&ie=UTF-8&output=rss
Mybloglog : http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/topics/microblogging/rss.xml
wikio: http://rss.wikio.fr/blogs/rss/a_la_une/search/microblogging
blogsearch.google : http://blogsearch.google.fr/blogsearch_feeds?hl=fr&q=microblogging&lr=&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=atom
Yahoo : http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=microblogging&adult_ok=1
Furl : http://rss.furl.net/items.rss?topic=microblogging

Ok, you can look for other RSS feeds of your choice and proceed the same way. I’ve already listed 10 of them this would be just enough for the time being.

You could past those feed into you RSS reader, but it is the awkward way to do it. Why not make it automatic! To that purpose you ave to go to pipes.yahoo.com create an account and then select the create a pipe function

First you have to create a form. On the left you have a menu with different options choose “User input”, then “Url input“. drag and drop it on the main board.

Let us continue with our example. Put “microblogging” in the text input window. Check the figure below. In the prompt you may type “tag to search” or what ever phrase you can think of.

Let us check the first RSS structure with delicious.com

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/microblogging

the common structure http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/ and then our search tag microblogging

This time you shall add the “url builder” into the main board (figure below)

In the base copy paste http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/ “text” just below the path element must be linked to the above module.

Just after this second module (url builder) drag and drop the third module (fetch feed) and link it to the url builder as it is described in the figure below. Then link the “output” module to the “fetch feed” module.

At this stage of this tutorial we have just created a tag informaton structure for delicious.com. Just to better understand what has been said the result is available here http://pipes.yahoo.com/thierryroget/veilletechno01

You may repeat the same process with other RSS found on the net, but sometimes the RSS structure is different. let us have a look at the next example.

let’s have a look at the Technorati RSS structure

http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/microblogging?authority=a4&language=fr

This time microblogging is right inside the RSS feed. You will have to change the “url builder” structure to fit this new rss feed. adding “authority=A4” puis ”language=fr” in the query parameters. In the example “fr” is the language (french) you may change it in any other language like “en” for english.

Now you are able to understand the main principle of this tutorial, so you may repeat this process to all you rss tags and then aggregate them into a single RSS feed. To be short, the result is already available here http://pipes.yahoo.com/thierryroget/veilletechno2

You can play with other words and forget about miccroblogging and put you favorite tag. You can duplicate this pipe for your own purpose change whatever you like and start being the big shot in what ever you enjoy in life.

You may find this tutorial a little bit complicated, but I assure you that once you get used to Pipe.Yahoo you’ll be able to get the right information you need. I advise you to digg into this tutorial and make your own findings.