Last week I introduced the ‘Something for the weekend’ feature where I post a link to an online tool which has potential journalistic applications.
This week’s tool is Comiqs,
“a service that lets our users create and share their comic-style stories with the community. We aim to provide our users with easy to use tools that transforms their most cherished and most memorable photographs into something fun. We also aim to build to build a fun and light-hearted community where people can hang out to have a laugh or two.”
Now there’s a rich history of comic strips and graphics in newspapers. Satirical cartoons are an obvious application of this.
Could Comiqs introduce a user generated element to that too?
The site already has a News and Politics section, while ‘People and Personalities‘ also has potential for satirical content. But the other categories bear looking at too. Life story and How to and tutorials have clear magazine equivalents.
There’s a lot of crap as always with UGC, but categories like ‘top rated’, ‘most viewed/discussed’ etc. should help filter through.
The site could also act as a platform for a news site’s readers – give them an image to download and point them to Comiqs to create the caption.
Some obvious problems: no RSS feeds; no way of knowing what language something is in before you click or search.
But lots of potential. Any ideas?
Online Journalism Blog 
hi wery good site
You might also want to try toonlet as an alternative to comiqs. Rather than focus on photos or clip art, toonlet puts the focus on character creation, and features a powerful avatar tool so you can make characters that look authentically hand-drawn.
From there, it’s easy to build out a library of moods for your characters to use in their comic strips.
(and toonlet comics do feature RSS feeds)
Swing on by and check out the site, or take the toonlet tour:
http://www.toonlet.com/tour
Let us know what you think!
Thanks!
-Craig (from toonlet)
Macs come with Comic Life software, which allows you to do the same thing but you have to share it yourself.
The elearning types are using this for demonstrating some key concepts of idea in a simple easy way.
Can be fun, but I remember an American paper doing a finance story as a comic strip – went a little bit too far for me.