A Cedar Park, Texas based startup called Mikonoclast, LLC recently launched Mikons.com, a site for self expression, social networking and commerce. Through clip art. The service is all about little icons; mikons is presumably a play on “my icons.”
You can claim, share or draw your own mikons in a shockwave drawing feature. The sharing function allows you to put a creative commons license or traditional copyright on your mikons. You can also keep them private and hidden if there are any mikons you’d like to keep as your personal little secret.
“Mikons,” the company says on the front page, “are your own personal tags that symbolize your life: your challenges, your dreams and your passions.” If you’d like to put these symbols for your life on t-shirts or stickers, that option appears to be coming soon.
The site is very functional and looks great. The company is especially proud of the drawing technology – which they say is “the first online vector editing graphic tool in the world.” This particular application of that technology seems to warrant most – either thankfulness that some startups have a sense of humor or existential concern that anyone would want to symbolize their inner self with clip art.
The company says that their service is similar to timeless visual communication methods throughout history, like petroglyphs. They hope that people will put their mikons on MySpace profile pages, blogs and a wide variety of physical merchandise that will be available soon.
So, what about Favicons and Gravatars? What are the usage rights of these creations?
I think favicons, by the way they are used, are meant to be used by any and everyone.
Keeping in mind, of course that these favicons should only be used to point to the same site that they were picked up from. If I use a favicon from one site on a different site *as* a favicon, then I would consider myself to be cheating, ethically, if not doing something illegal outright.
I made and maintain a set of social bookmarking templates on my site for usage on Blogger and Wordpress (in a nice click to show/hide way with tooltips), that rely quite heavily on a site’s favicon to portray it’s identity.
I think this makes the whole social bookmarking concept look pretty while staying within the bounds of “correct usage”.
My blogger template for social bookmarking is on public demo at: http://dhigu.blogspot.com.
Chris, if you’re asking what the rights are around the creations in the Mikons service, that is one setting the creator of each item sets when saving. You can select CC-by-nd I think, copyright or private.
It’s not the first online vector editor by a long way. There was a quicktime-based on that made PDF’s in 1999, and any number of flash-based ones. Even http://ajaxsketch.com/ goes back a few months.
As a programmer, I really like what they did. The tool to make the icons is pretty nice and once you figure out how to do things like copy an object it’s pretty easy to use. However, I think the lack of color really limits its potential… I hope they change that eventually.
Ajaxsketch is neat, but it seems like Mikons has really raised the bar here. Their tools can do quite a lot.
But why no color (their site design could do with some too)? Strangely, their FAQ doesn’t address this. It’s not much use without color IMO.
This site looks so cool. Finally some art challenged people like me can create sexy icons.
Interesting Social Bookmarking drop-down, Dhiraj.
One problem about this Mikons site. It doesn’t support my OS. I have a MacBook Pro running the Universal Binary version of OS X and it’s telling me that I have to restart my browser (Safari and/or Firefox) and run it through Rosetta if I want to use the site. This is because the entire site is built with Macromedia Shockwave, which isn’t out for UB yet. So tough luck for all of us Intel-Mac users.
Digg this story here.
I’ll start with the positive point that its a very well-designed application and it could be appealing to many people. I tried it out but since I am someone that uses Illustrator regularly, It actually hindered me because it was too simplified. I am sure for the laymen it would be a lot more exciting. This may be just me, but I don’t understand what would be compelling enough to make someone become a long-term member/contributor.
Nice tool. For people with no talent for drawing, it could come in handy.
Nice site, good idea but i don’t see it exploding. I mean it’s fun and all but not addictive enough to hold onto users for years like http://www.channelremote.com
Like Joe Youngblood there said, it’s a neat idea, but it just won’t get a huge audience. Let’s just say, Mikons won’t be the next Myspace. I see where the developers are coming from; the idea of Mikons being the 21st century answer to the prehistoric petroglyph. But, there’s one problem… Cavemen drew pictures on walls because they didn’t have a written language yet, and since the written word came into play, petroglyphs have generally gone out of fashion.
Short answer: I can see people sticking these on their Myspace pages, or on t-shirts, but I also see this becoming a fad unless the developers have a larger plan up their sleeves.
HEY!!! i was trying to find out information on cave men and the cave paintings! not this load of codswallop! disappointing, very disappointing indeed.
We have an online vector based drawing platform at ZCubes (www.zcubes.com). Unlike Mikons, though, ours is entirely browser based (and in color!) We are still in beta but pretty psyched with how it is coming along. And we do a lot more than just paint and draw.
it’s fun and all but not addictive enough to hold onto users for years like http://www.rockyslots.com.com