How can you capture some of the magic of animation without blowing a big hole in your budget?

Minivid is a simple animation solution that lets you create custom cartoon shorts and share them with the world. The site provides a demo for using all the features, but the drag-and drop functionality of this application makes it a snap to create and edit animations in minutes. Fuzzwich has preloaded Minivid with a stable of playful “actors”, multi-layer backgrounds, and music selections. Hit record and position your actors on screen by dragging them with your mouse. Add comment bubbles or choose from each actors available actions menu. For example, the ninja can throw a ninja star or use his sword; another character can grow a beard. You can even change the the scale of the actors or the timing of events by pausing your animation and manipulating all the ingredients in the editing bar.

Check out this nifty little animation we created on the fly:

Fuzzwich publishes and hosts all your animations on their site; animators are given a free portfolio space, where you can share your animations, launch mini cartoon campaigns, or embed your animations in your website or social media site (like Facebook or Myspace).

If you are looking to add something fun to your site or need a free tool for creating branded animations, check out Minivid. Though we warn you, be prepared to lose countless hours playing with this application.

Ready to make the leap beyond those old text and display ads? Maybe it’s time to dip your toe into video ads.

If you’re wondering where to go to place those video ads, YuMe, a broadband video advertising network, should be on your list. With over 400 premium video sites on tap and 120 million unique visitors a month, it’s the largest of its kind, and includes NBC, BitTorrent, and Microsoft among its providers. YuMe was designed exclusively to monetize and track video content. Advertisers can choose by programming verticals (like entertainment, lifestyle, news, music, and sports,) or target audiences based on geography or content popularity. And regardless of the delivery platform (streaming, download, mobile), YuMe provides real-time monitoring and analytics, so there’s no guesswork involved when measuring the success of your campaign.

Video ad production and placement doesn’t take a ton of money. Are your old notions standing in the way?

Anyone who sells anything from croissants to chemicals knows the painful truth of so many product-focused businesses. You end up giving away a lot of services for free.

Now, no matter the size of your business, you have an easy tool for selling your knowledge with MindBites. Here’s how it works. Sign up to become an author, create your short video, upload it, promote it, and then, ideally wait for your viewers to show up. Every time someone views your video, you earn $1. Viewers pay between 1.69 and $1.99 to purchase your small video. It’s early going in the sale of video content, so you’re not likely to make a fortune.

If you or your brand already have significant star power, let this serve as an example that you can apply in a site of your own. In any case, no matter what business you’re in, think about how you might be able to monetize all of the services that you currently offer for free.

We’re all used to reading text comments, but sometimes video can say a lot more. Up until now, adding video to blog comments has been almost impossible.

With Seesmic’s new WordPress blog plugin, now it’s easy. Click on the regular comments tab (found at the bottom of your blog post) and choose the video option from the drop down menu. Simply click the red recording button or the enter key to start/stop the recording. Then, save, title, and post, and ta-dah you have engaging reader content on your site, with no effort on your part or added expense. With up to 5 minutes of recording space, the floor is open.

And you never know, a customer might actually say something nice about your brand that you can reuse as a testimonial. You won’t know until you let them speak.

Now you can embed a YouTube video into a Google map. When your potential customers find you through Google, they can watch a video that describes your business. Here’s an easy to follow example for a San Francisco bakery.

Ideally, you have already gone ahead and set up your business in Google maps, so prospects can find you easily. If so, here’s what you need to do: simply upload your videos to YouTube and ensure that the ‘embed’ option is turned on. Then, associate your video to your business listing through the Local Business Center.

For the cost of a simple YouTube video recording, you can ensure that web searchers find your video that explains in glorious detail why they should buy from you.

Thinking about creating some great videos to share on your site? That’s a great idea. The tough question that surfaces . . . what sort of video player should you use?

When it comes to video publishing, Brightcove offers a service you might consider. It makes it easy for you to upload and manage your video library using a web-based video platform. With so many video players, it’s easy to think that they’re all the same. However, you should consider customizing the video player. Brightcove makes it easy to customize their video player templates, giving you the ability to control everything from the video player branding to the design of the user experience.

Check out CampJam videos for an example of what a Brightcove video player can do for you. Now you can go forth and video with reckless abandon.

Flickr video is a new service for premium Flickr account holders that lets you upload and share short video clips (no longer than 90 seconds). Short, yes, but certainly enough time to demo your products or include a video testimonial on your site. If you want to get fancy, you could even add a little music and a nice introduction- a handy feature that Flickr includes.

What’s really nice about Flickr’s video integration is that it lets you organize your photos and videos in one premium service. The service treats videos like “long photos”- they appear beside photos on your Flickr page and can be embedded in your website or blog. Flickr videos can show up on RSS Feeds and photostreams too. Start recording - not just snapping.

Ever experience the torture of watching someone’s vacation slide show? While we all love great images, we love them more when they’re put to music.

Enter Animoto. It’s a tool that lets you take images (maybe that you have on Flickr, as we discussed in Do these make me look fat?), then choose some music (either provided or uploaded by you), and then converts the whole mix into a widgetized video. These videos aren’t just the Ken Burns effect over and over and over again (enough already!). Each one is unique, timed to the music you’ve selected.

If you have photos of your products, your customers, or anything related to your business and want a mini “music video,” here’s the bargain basement way to make it. The 15-second version is free … and once you’ve created it, you can use their tools to post it just about anywhere (Facebook, Blogger, etc.).

You knew it had to happen. It was just a matter of when.

Here’s an easy way to integrate videos into eBay - a service called Vzaar. You might think, why not just embed a video from YouTube. Here’s why - videos from Vzaar’s video player are made to be used on eBay. It will link directly to the bidding tool, incorporate the user’s feedback rating, and even show how much time is remaining in the auction. Vzaar is able to do this because it’s been accredited by eBay (and therefore gains special access).

If you want a little box at the top of your eBay listing to help drive your auctions higher or to close your “buy it now” deals, just sign up, upload your video, and get going. Oh, and don’t forget, it’s free, so you’ve nothing to lose.

We’re all ready to edit just about anything that we see. But how do you use your red pen (or even just your pencil) to put your stamp on video?

With a video doodle, made easy by Voicethread. In this, of course, video overview, you’ll see how you can use this system to add whatever you like to a video. In other words, in your video annotation, you can explain what you’re doing, stop the feature video, add a drawing, circle what you want to circle. If you’ve ever watched the football game where they draw arrows, x’s, and o’s, this is what we’re talking about. Unleash your inner John Madden.

Create your account, upload your video, add your comments (or doodles), and then share. It’s all free.

We’re all time starved. Just about anything that’s more complicated than a Hot Pocket requires an elevator speech. Even your website.

Why not use a video bubble from Bubbleguru to give your site’s visitors the quick and dirty overview. Or, even better, just to hit your key selling points even harder. It’s so easy that we gave it a whirl. Sign up, create your video (using your videocam), choose a few options (such as bubble sound or no), generate the code, load it up and off you go. The hard part is figuring out what to say and how to look good. As we all know, lighting is everything. You can add these bubbles where you need them, or just one for an intro overview. Here’s another example with a custom bubble.

Adding a bubble starts at $4 a month (less than a double latte) and will likely improve your conversion. Their 14-day free trial is long enough to learn if it works without paying a dime. Get going.

With millions and millions of videos playing every month across the web, it seems kind of strange that almost none of them carry advertising.

This strangeness has ended because now you can run “Invideo” ads (animated overlay Flash ads) using the Google AdWords / Adsense network. There are two types of ads that can appear in videos from participating publishers or Google’s own YouTube

: first there are image overlay ads (example) that appear in the bottom 20% of the video viewing area, second there are text based pay per click ads (example) that can show in the same lower portion of the video. Seeing is believing, so check ‘em out.

The InVideo ads are sold on a CPM basis, while the text overlay ads are sold on a CPC basis. InVideo ads are currently only available to advertisers with managed (meaning big) accounts. You can sign up to learn when they’re more widely available. Don’t you think you should?

We wrote about the power of collaborating on the creation of a document using wikis in The dyslexic New Zealander. But these days, text and images can only get you so far.

Try the video enabled collaboration tool Kaltura to take wiki-like collaboration to the next level. While you can follow the details in this tour, all you need to do is really set up the specific page (where your shared video will reside), invite your fellow collaborators, and then upload photos, videos, and audio files. Once you have files that have been uploaded (by you or anyone in your group), you can then go to work creating and editing your final video. You can drag and drop videos and images along a time-line, in much the same way that professional video editing is done. Just as with a text-based wiki, your fellow collaborators can edit with you.

At your next big PR event, why not ask your team, interns, or just about anybody to collaborate on a summary that incorporates video and audio highlights from a group perspective? Sometimes fast and authentic is much more powerful than slick and professional.

When you’re thinking about placing display ads on a site to reach your targeted user, do you really think that a static image will break through the clutter?

Explore the dynamic display ads available from PointRoll accessible through its development tool named AdPortal
. AdPortal lets you load your graphics into many dynamic display formats, specifying panel movements and adding optional interactive features. Then, you can place your ads by selecting any combination of sites, sections and positions from nearly any publisher and assigning your ad to the campaign. While developing a display ad probably will require the help of a web designer, keep in mind that not all display ads are created equal. What’s important here is that there’s really no limit to what a display ad can do. It can even swim across the page as you’ll see in the opening screen of the Georgia Aquarium.

There’s no reason to stick with vanilla when you can have just about any flavor you can imagine.

If images or videos sell, then full screen images or full screen videos are likely to sell even harder. Problem is, how do you enable a full screen gallery without a lot of technical prowess or a lot of dough?

The answer is PicLens Lite. With this software, you can enable your site so that visitors see a layout of photos, but with the addition of a customizable “Start slideshow” button. When they click the button, they’re shown a slideshow, complete with user controls. If they choose, they can expand the show into a full-screen experience. There are two ways to enable the system - one is to use downloadable desktop software (PicLens Publisher) that lets you configure the pieces you need. The other is to refer to this webmaster guide for enabling more sophisticated versions, including videos.

Check out some interesting examples of how this system can turn ho hum into OMG! (travel guide, photography site). No matter what you’re selling, won’t a close-up help close the deal?

The video image search that you see on the web today isn’t really searching - it’s just pulling images based on tags or filenames. In other words, it’s not actually searching the video. If you have a lot of video to monetize, what can you do?

The answer might be a search tool like Viewdle. It’s a facial recognition platform that makes it easy to index, search, and then monetize video assets. As you’ll see on their site (and their example using video from Reuters), Viewdle presents a way for you to search through video and pull out people based on facial recognition. Looking for the best video image of Paris Hilton or Elton John, here’s an easy way to find it. It’s not the best tool for finding a video of Eudora Welty just yet.

As everyone has learned from the success of Google, search can be a powerful vehicle for monetizing content. By attaching this search tool to your content, you might find new revenue.

We all know that no one really reads anything anymore. On the web, people skim aggressively. They definitely don’t linger over long, dense blocks of text. So, what do you do if your product or service can’t easily be summed up in an image or short description?

WebPeople can break through the clutter and explain your offering using a video spokesperson. While we all cringe at the thought of instant-on video, it doesn’t have to be horrific. For example, consider these two websites: weddingfavors.com and myweddingfavors.com. Each sells, apparently, a similar array of items. Which one do you think is more likely to close the deal? By the looks of it, when you search in Google, the answer is clear.

So, how does this work?First, create your message. Short and sweet is what you need -just enough to capture attention. Next, pick your actor from this rather extensive selection. You’ll also be able to choose wardrobe, hand gestures, and the size of the image on your site. WebPeople will manage the recording and then send you a code for your site that will make the video appear. All of this can be had for as little as $300 up front and a monthly fee of less than $200.

If you’re selling a complicated product or competing in a tough category, can you afford not to stand out?

In the old days (and probably frequently still today), it wasn’t unusual at all to come across an interesting or relevant article and then fax it to an important customer.

Now you can go several steps further. You can annotate web-based articles or websites with video using Eyejot this! With this service, you record a video directly (no uploads), using your videocam (now included with new laptops / desktops). Indicate the URL of the web page in the form when it’s presented. Then, send the email. When your recipient clicks the attached link, he/she will find your video in a frame, on top of the web page you indicated (see this example).

Now you can send a video annotation to any web page you come across. There’s nothing better than letting your best customers know that you’re thinking of them.