Scrapblog is Dead Sexy

I think I first read about Scrapblog on Tara Hunt’s site. It kind of defies description, so here’s the blurb from their About page:

We created Scrapblog because we wanted to go beyond sharing our photos and videos online. We made Scrapblog drag-and-drop-easy so that everyone can tell their stories and create beautiful multimedia scrapbooks.

Our goal is to enable everyday people to express themselves online in a creative way. We’ve been developing Scrapblog for over two years. However, what you see online today is only the beginning.

Their implementation (built with Adobe’s fancy new technology) is killer–this is a Web app that anybody in your family could use. It’s certainly not bug-free (most trivial one I spotted: tags should be separated by ‘commas’, not ‘comas’), but it’s super-easy to use with some pretty neat out-of-the-box themes. I also like their third-party integration with services like YouTube and Flickr–hurray for not having to import a huge schwack of photos into their app.

Four quick points of user feedback:

• When I’m picking items to add to my tray, I might start with the pick list set to all themes, and select a few items. Then I might choose to go to a particular theme, and the previous items I’ve selected get lost, and don’t get added to the tray. That makes me sad.
• There’s right-click menu functionality, but it’s got the default menu-in-browser look and feel. For the past decade, users have been right-clicking on Flash objects to no effect. I tried it in Scrapblog, saw that the pop-up menu looked the same, and assumed it was useless. Change the aesthetic of the right-click menu so it looks Scrapblog-specific (I believe Flickr does this in their Organizer, I’m not sure).
• If I edit a Scrapblog I’ve already published, I have to re-save and re-publish it to see those changes pushed out to the public view. It’d be great if that happened automagically after I clicked ‘save’.
• For advanced users (hide the functionality by default), add an RSS feed display. Let me specify a feed, and drag a little widget onto a Scrapblog page. The widget will then display the most recent x items from that feed. This way I could use Scrapblog to build a cool, customized RSS reader. Then enable photo and video feeds, so that a given space on a Scrapblog page isn’t static content, but shows the latest photo or video from a feed.

When is a Scrapbook a Blog?

My (quite minor) complaint is around the name, and understanding how it might sit in my, uh, personal workflow. It seems much more like a great, virtual scrapbook than a blog. I see myself returning home from a trip or a conference and building a multi-page Scrapblog in one sitting. I probably wouldn’t revisit it later. For my next usage, I’d create a whole other Scrapblog, and so forth and so on. So, I feel like including the term ‘blog’ is a bit of a misnomer. On the other hand, they do have a bunch of bloggy features like RSS feeds, comments and so forth.

Anyhow, I whipped up this little two-page Scrapblog, using photos from our trip to Cuba. They’ve got pre-made themes, but I whacked these together on my own:

http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer_embed.swf?embed=1&scrapblogID=2095

Where’s the Dough?

The question I often to fail ask: how will they make money? The obvious one for me is in getting your Scrapblogs printed, bound and shipped to you and your loved ones. I don’t see any advertising yet, but they could always offer a freemium model like Flickr (free with ads, or pay and get new features and the ads disappear).

UPDATE: Susie wrote about Scrapblog too: “In about 30 minutes, I made a page that looks it is right out of a scrapbook. A good scrapbook, mind you! I uploaded photos, chose a background, stickers, text, shapes, all without reading a single Help file.”