about stickam.com and as per my usual email clutter it took me quite some time to get around to checking it out... some days later I'm still not sure how to... express.. my views on it

basically stickam.com "...allows you to easily place streaming video, slide show, music, and live video chat on your blog and/or web site. With Stickam™, you can instantly play your videos online using just your web browser..." but it's also more than just video and chat (which I think is a a cool combination) it actually reminds me of MySpace.com and Bebo.com in regard to the profile and homepage aspect of it all... stickam.com just has more umm ppl with umm..... visible body parts

but back to the cool part about stickam.com .... I was intrigued by the copy and paste aspect of being able to stream your webcam.. with unlimited bandwidth... across any website... I was more impressed that they'd already catered to the likes of MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, Blogger and TagWorld... of which I'd really only head about MySpace and more recently Friendster ... I'm soooo out of touch these days but old age aside I decided to plod on and see just what's it all about... so I signed up...

you must be 14yrs or older to join... I cruised in easily .... I then started to wade my way through the mass of required fields and onto the Privacy Policy and TOS which is well worth a read... I have to admit I stumbled over the part "Restrictions on Posting Content (3) is libelous, defamatory, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, vulgar, obscene, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable.." but I ultimately come to the conclusion that either the explicit webcams I had seen over the last few days were in fact out of the "norm" and just a coincidence or that I was a complete prude boardering on being a fuddy duddy... I opted for the former

Once my sign-up was completed I then quickly skimmed through completing the online profile... next step was inviting and adding friends.... stickam.com is without doubt geared up to spread the word as there is also options in there which allow you to import your existing contacts from Yahoo!, Hotmail, GMail, AOL and Outlook Express... I decided to give my friends a break from my latest quirky find and just wander on through friendless.. I have to admit that by now... after wading my way through the in's and out's of the process I was just a tad bored

Once in my profile I feigned optimism, set My Mood to Chillin! had a quick poke around the options, preferences and settings and then waddled onto the Customize Player page... oh brother... I was clearly in the wrong headspace so I unfolder my legs, slid off my chair, grabbed my now empty and headed off to find the coffee pot....

... the didn't help a great deal in the end .... I opted... out of pure laziness for the stock standard setup.. the idea of background images was a little too much so I threw on a colour (black), quickly selected the smallest player, grabbed the code smacked it on here...

Broadcast Yourself LIVE

by default it displays your main profile picture... not inspiring really... so I hit the My Photos (images section)... no big surprise that that would appeal to me... and I set about uploading a random selection of my photos that I'd placed in polaroid frames. The process seemed to take forever.. it didn't really though.. it just seemed to simply because you upload images via your browser through the old stock standard navigate your way to the directory.. hit ok... tab down a field, navigate your way back through the directory.. yada yada... my attention span timed out at approx 15 or so images

Next... and finally.... was of course the main reason for plonking with stickam.com to begin with... streaming video...
I wasn't off to a great start... the stream uses flash and for some bizarre reason known only to firefox.. it decided not to play nicely... everytime I went to set up my webcam in my browser firefox spat the dummy and closed down ... in the end I gave up and headed to my notebook, threw open IE(6) and it was all smooth sailing from there on in... the broadcast works perfectly, super clear when set to small and not too bad at all under the larger format...

Broadcast Yourself LIVE

I'm not sure I'll ever actually use stickam.com to broadcast any of my webcams... the idea of having live chat on each stream is enough to put me off... I really don't need any more distractions than I already have at present ... but it's cool technology ... it is easy to set up.. if you have your brain in the right gear which of course I didn't ... and the copy and paste aspect of it all is exactly that... no additional configuration required. You can also record from your webcam which I think is rather funky and this is dead easy to do... no brain function required at all... I managed to record and make available (via View Movies above) a few seconds of what goes on in our front yard... not a great deal...

To me stickam.com is a cross between MySpace, Flickr and an IM that offers combined webcam & voice.. but all rolled into one... it's definately worth playing with if you have some free time and a webcam.. it's also an added bonus and pretty funky accessory for your MySpace or Friendster account

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