Man, just saw the coolest thing, called SitePal:
The [V]Host SitePal™ creates animated characters that live on all webpages. Created in Flash, [V]Host SitePal™ characters can lip-sync your recordings, or recite any text that you write. There are no downloads or CDs. All the scenes are streamed from our servers to your web pages. In just a few minutes, you can have one of these characters on your site.
The SitePal site also supports text-to-speech technologies, as well as calling in by phone with automatic lip syncing.
I was thinking how cool it would be to use SitePal as a blogging tool. I would call in each day using a telephone, and record my blog entries throughout the day by using the phone. On my blog would be my SitePal character, with the current date right above that, just as on existing blogs. Below the SitePal character would be two links: Previous Day/Entry and Next Day/Entry, or something to that effect. Pressing these would reload the page, with the same SitePal character in the middle, but with different queued SitePal voice data for that day (this could all even be a complete Flash movie, so that it wouldn't have to reload; instead, it would just load your voice data somehow, or reload the SitePal Flash movie portion in place). On the right-side of the SitePal character would be a calendar, just as on Radio Userland blogs so that someone could do "random access" to archives of previous blogs.
You could even offer a "vanity service" where someone could send you a photo of themselves, and you could have an in-staff artist render a close SitePal look alike character.
One issue would be how to somehow record "links", just as blogs tend to link to other things that are being commented on. Perhaps the SitePal blogger could have links associated with each "entry" for that day, that show as clickable links as the audio blog-stream runs.
Other exciting questions are about how to deal with RSS and adding commenting systems for each SitePal entry (as text or even as the person who is commenting's own SitePal character!)
The [V]Host SitePal™ creates animated characters that live on all webpages. Created in Flash, [V]Host SitePal™ characters can lip-sync your recordings, or recite any text that you write. There are no downloads or CDs. All the scenes are streamed from our servers to your web pages. In just a few minutes, you can have one of these characters on your site.
The SitePal site also supports text-to-speech technologies, as well as calling in by phone with automatic lip syncing.
I was thinking how cool it would be to use SitePal as a blogging tool. I would call in each day using a telephone, and record my blog entries throughout the day by using the phone. On my blog would be my SitePal character, with the current date right above that, just as on existing blogs. Below the SitePal character would be two links: Previous Day/Entry and Next Day/Entry, or something to that effect. Pressing these would reload the page, with the same SitePal character in the middle, but with different queued SitePal voice data for that day (this could all even be a complete Flash movie, so that it wouldn't have to reload; instead, it would just load your voice data somehow, or reload the SitePal Flash movie portion in place). On the right-side of the SitePal character would be a calendar, just as on Radio Userland blogs so that someone could do "random access" to archives of previous blogs.
You could even offer a "vanity service" where someone could send you a photo of themselves, and you could have an in-staff artist render a close SitePal look alike character.
One issue would be how to somehow record "links", just as blogs tend to link to other things that are being commented on. Perhaps the SitePal blogger could have links associated with each "entry" for that day, that show as clickable links as the audio blog-stream runs.
Other exciting questions are about how to deal with RSS and adding commenting systems for each SitePal entry (as text or even as the person who is commenting's own SitePal character!)
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