This is cool! I recently saw a facebook post by Michael Brandevold illustrating a “thinglink” image. I was intrigued by the possibilities I saw! Thinglink is a provider of image interaction tools. What this particular tool does is allow people like you and me to embed links with text directly in our photos to all kinds of stuff anywhere on the internet such as music, commerce sites, blogs, websites, email, etc.

I’ll use my photo of Affair with the Muse, Aoede’s NEW music release CD Cover, to illustrate:

If you simply scroll over my image above, you’ll notice that a series of ‘hotspots’ appear, each one linking to one of my sites. In this case, I included: my twitter, facebook, my press release, a feature in The Music Mail, my media player and the coolest one-directly to an mp3 that plays music right from the photo! This music link is due to the partnership between Thinglink and Soundcloud that was just launched today! The innovative sound player from Soundcloud enables anyone to add music and sound directly to their images-connecting sound and images!! That’s pretty cool in my book.

If you click on each link, it takes you directly to the site listed. Plus you can add a text description next to the link. Further, you can easily edit your tags, share the image and embed it directly into another site just by clicking on the left side buttons on the photo.

Using thinglink on a website such as mine only called for installing a few lines of javascript, which thinglink supplies. Further, Thinglink provides statistics for all the hovers and click through rates for each image. I look forward to using this new tool and reporting back on my statistics next month.

Want to add your links and sounds to your images?

?      Set up a free account at ThingLink.com and Soundcloud.com.
?      Install a few lines of ThingLink javascript on your website or blog
?      When you input a SoundCloud URL into a tag’s link field, a player appears in your tag.  Click it and it starts playing the track in the background.