Cartoonize Your Photos at Befunky
If you're a fan of funky-looking cartoons and comics, then I'm sure you will love this site. BeFunky lets you have fun with your photos by letting you cartoonize them. It has several applications which allows you to instantly and effortlessly turn photos of yourself into a cartoon you've always dreamed of being. 
Here's the site's blurb about the Cartoonizer App:Upload your image and start using the cartoonizer tool to warp, sketch and color your cartoon. Add all kinds of frames, graphics and shapes to your design and then share it on your favorite social networks including FaceBook, Myspace, Hi5, Friendster and Bebo. No special art school education or graphic design skills are needed.
The service is completely free and you don't have to download any software for it.
They are also planning to release a "Video Cartoonizer" soon. If you've seen Scanner Darkly, your cartoonized videos will look something like that. Here is an example:
Read more!Know Your Internet Speed With Speedtest.net
Want to know your real-world internet connection speed as compared to what your provider advertised to you? Here is one cool tool to do it. Speedtest.net is a free, simple and straight-forward web tool to check your internet connection speed. It has scattered several hundreds of testing servers around the world to analyze global internet performance.
In starting a test, Speedtest.net initially recommends the geographically-closest server from you to test your connection. Once you chose the server, it automatically test how fast the Download (the speed of data from the server to your computer) and Upload (the speed of sending data from your computer to the server) that your connection is capable of reaching. The tests are performed completely within your web browser over HTTP (just like normal web browsing).
After the test, your speed test result is shown where your download and upload speeds are indicated as kb/s (kilo bits per second or kbps). You will also be able to share your results through the links provided for blogs, forums or a direct link. The link directs to the .png image of your unique test result. Here's what I got:
The good thing about the results page is that you can rate your ISP. It's like another way of saying your happy or not happy with your internet performance. From this rating and the ratings of other people of the same provider, the ISP's rank is determined locally or globally based on user feedback.
You can also browse test results from around the globe and compare what your internet service provider actually gives you against other ISPs available in your area. You can check which ISP ranks BEST in your location. For those who's interested in global statistics, you can analyze broadband speeds around the world.
Another brilliant thing about Speedtest.net is that every test you make, the result is stored by Speedtest.net. Every test is not gone into waste. You can view your past results summarized in your fastest download/upload, average download/upload, number of test taken, your ISP and your IP address. 
You will also have an idea of what your internet connection's country and global ranks are. Moreover, you will also see your ISP's average speed, your country's average speed, global average speed and more! There is a lot of information to see if you are interested in it.
This is probably the most accurate internet speed checker I've seen. They have a really cool interface too. Want to try it? Just tick the logo at the left.
Read more!ICONlook: the Icon Search Engine
ICONlook.com is a simple and neat icon search engine. The site is still in BETA but it already has tons of cool and beautiful icons ready for download and use. If you are looking for icons to personalize your system or want to make some glare in your website with astonishing images and thumbnails, this is the site to look at. Be it a computer icon, system tools icons, applications icon, RSS buttons, or anything else, you can find it! 
Personally, what I like about this site is the quality of its icons. Almost every icon is beautifully made and with a Web2.0 look, and you can download it for FREE (both the .ico file and the accompanying .png file). You can search by a keyword and image size. Depending on the icon, the available image sizes are 12x12, 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 48x48, 64x64 and 128x128.
Here is a snapshot of some of the popular icons in its library.
You can check it out and look for your favorite icons here.
Here are some of my favorites.
Read more!6 Awesome and Engaging Widgets for Your Blog
There are tons of widgets you can find the web which can add spice in your blog. But most of them lack one important functionality which most of us blogger would want our blogs have - user engagement.
Wowzio brought six engaging and essential blog widgets in one place. These are not the standard kind of widgets you can find because they are fast, live and relevant. Best of all, these widgets can attract viewers and make them stay for a longer time, hence increasing the page views in your blog or website.
I tried to setup my own widgets and amazingly, all I need was my RSS feed and all six widgets are ready to run. The widgets below are real widgets for DagitabLog™ using Wowzio widgets. Each of them is customizable to one's preferences like background color, width, height, play speed, and many more using Wowzio's WSYWYG editor. I will install a couple of these widgets in DagitabLog and see how it can generate more page views in my site.
1. Feed Content
The content widget is a syndication and content distribution mechanism. You can aggregate feeds from multiple sources ( upto 15 ) into one widget. You can use it for cross-promotion of content, or syndication via 3rd party channels.
2. Panoramic Slideshow
3. Photo Gallery
4. Tag Cloud
The tagcloud widget helps bubble up the rich content that is deeply embedded in your blog posts. When a user clicks on a tag, it will display the matching blog posts inside the tagcloud widget frame, thus keeping the user on the same page ( and in the same context ).
5. Slideshow
This widget provides an elegant and simple way for users of your blog/site to discover the awesome content created by you. Each photo links back to it's corresponding blog post. This results in increased engagement of users to your blog, causing an increase in pageviews.
6. Live Activity
Wowzio's Live Activity Widget provides you and your users with a "live" feed of the visits to your blog or site. Everytime a page that the widget is on loads, it detects the user's location and the page they are coming from. This information is fed in real-time to every other widget open at that time, to give your visitors a rare insight into the vitality of your blog or site.
Read more!The Coolest Image Search Tool
Today, I am going to share with you an interesting web tool which searches Flickr images in terms of visual similarity. The most common way we know how to search an image is using a keyword like how Google Image Search works. But there is another brilliant way of doing it. Idée's Multicolr Search Lab, has created a visual search method using visual attributes such as color, shape and texture. It sounds too geeky but this is so far the coolest and most grandeur image search tool that I have ever seen. It's an amazing application with amazing results!
So how does this Multicolr works?
By choosing up to ten colors, Multicolr will extract those colors from about 10 million most interesting Creative Commons images on Flickr. Using Idée's visual search technology, Multicolr will give you the images of your chosen colors.
Here is a screenshot of how to do an image search.
On the upper right of the screen, you can choose the color you want to search for. I chose the shades of red and green. The images will automatically update and show interesting images of red and green. Oh my, the results were a bunch of flowers as what I guessed. You can also click on individual images to see a bigger view of it.
You can add more colors to search for and see how magnificent the results will be. Click here to try it out.
Read more!Free Designer Fonts From DaFont
Are you looking for free font designs with a cool look? I've searched DaFont's collection of fonts and here is a list of my best picks. I am still thinking which of these fonts I'll be using to make a logo of my blog's name.
1. Trashco
2. VTKS Revolt
3. abite
4. Sidewalk
5. Capture it
6. Epoxy History
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Read more!Cligs: TinyURL Plus Analytics
I was twittering two days ago, following the followed, and I found this URL shortening service along the way. It's called Cligs. According to its website, its name happen to came from the word clicks with a g (as in go) pronounced at the end. I see it as a creative term actually, and it really caught my attention because of its similarity to tinyURL but with one BIG difference - free analytics.
Cligs is a very useful tool in converting your long URLs into short ones - very much needed when space is a hot resource! It's best to use in your twitter link updates, email and blog links, and even hiding your affiliate links. On top of these, Cligs can give you a detailed traffic analysis and information about your created short URLs like
I created an account and started to create my own cligs, and its giving me a birds-eye view of my links everyday, something I have been looking for. You can also sign-up at the website for FREE and start making your own cligs and see how useful it will work to you. Or you can read more about the The Blog of Cligs for more information on how it works.
Read more!Readers
