I stumbled onto a service called "Slide" (at www.slide.com) a few weeks ago. They have an image "ticker" system currently still in beta. You can upload pictures manually or by RSS feed into your preferred individual ticker and then display that ticker on nearly web page or your computer.

All of the comics on printed "funny pages" are essentially all within your field of view, albeit sometimes with a minimal amount of page turning, and they typically don't overflow into the main news sections. It seemed to me that a tool like Slide could be a great "funny pages" system for the web, allowing a group of online comics to come all within your field of view without taking up the whole of the page/site. Ticker systems such as Slide's would allow for "multi-tooncasting."

Here's a specific example: Imagine a comic collective like Boxcar Comics or Blank Label Comics creating their own "strip tickers," fully loaded up with each member's single-most recent strip. I would imaging a news service would be interested in having such a pre-packaged strip ticker placed somewhere prominent on their site--maybe they would even pay for strip tickers full of tried-and-true webcomics.

I created a special RSS feed and Slide ticker for Local Heroes to see how multi-tooncasting might work. Check out the final version here on the Local Heroes archives index: http://www.localheroes.us/archives/.

I ran into one bit of trouble while experimenting with Slide: The ticker feed code they supply doesn't work. I assumed the broken code was actually supposed to be the same as the working code that Slide used on their own page. I copied the working code to my site and the ticker started working properly. Still some bugs to work out, but then again it *is* still listed as a "beta."

D.J. Coffman over at Yirmumah has started experimenting with a similar service for his strip called FilmLoop. He's also discovered a section of their site where a number of people have been adding comics into their own FilmLoop tickers: http://network.filmloop.com/humor (although I don't know how many of them are managed by the respective comic creators). I like Slide's service better at the moment, if only because you don't have to sign up for the service to see the full ticker image.

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