scrapbooking

There hasn't been a lot of scanner innovation in the past few years (and "hasn't been a lot" is my way of saying "none" without having to verify it); even prices seem to have stopped dropping. Nevertheless, there's been a mini-surge in demand from the growing scrapbooker crowd after several lull years, so manufacturers continue to tweak the designs and software features.

Bet you thought that was leading up to an announcement of some cool new scanner technology from Epson. Nope. Sorry. Just a new $99 scanner with a nifty lid--though not unique … Read more

Do we really need another outlet for photo sharing? Shutterfly thinks so.

The photo-printing service, best known for publishing custom calendars, albums, posters, and other photography-infused goods, announced on Wednesday the launch of "Shutterfly Gallery," a social network that is sort of like a Flickr for the scrapbooking set.

Shutterfly Gallery is the first major project launched since the publicly traded company acquired Nexo Systems, a Web site personalization start-up. Nexo's technology has provided the technology for the new social-networking arm of Shutterfly.

Shutterfly Gallery encourages "storytelling" (see, I told you it would appeal to … Read more

Ript is a new, free software application in beta development that lets you collect images and text from the Web, then compile and arrange them into pages you can print or share with friends and family. It's a simple freeware idea that makes sense...and it's from Oprah? Well, sort of. The publisher is the Oprah Winfrey-founded Oxygen Media, recently acquired by Universal.

Ript works via an overlay "Pile"--representing by a stack of documents--that sits on a layer on top of all your applications. You can work with your programs as you normally would, and … Read more

The Vidstone "Serenity panel" is an electronic altar to the departed, designed to be propped up on top of a grave. It's not doing that well, maybe because it's a product that inherently contradicts itself.

What would Marshall McLuhan say? The medium is the message. In many people's eyes, digital video technology speaks of the electronic future, while traditional granite and marble reference the geological past. Honoring those gone before us is normally a backward-looking activity. The Vidstone seems antithetical to the aesthetic of monuments and memories--a digital scrapbook, with its delicate electronics, is not … Read more

Leaving aside my somewhat atypical views on death and ancestor worship, the concept of mixing up a cocktail of printer inks and ashes of dead people to create memorial prints--at $70 to $150 bucks a pop--leaves me with a big case of the ickies. But inkafterlife.com clearly feels no such squeamishness.

Who knows--there may be some big subculture of Goth scrapbookers out there waiting for just such a confluence of hobbies. And similar urn-obsolescing products such as Carbon Gems, Breath Capture and Petglash make bringing out your dead look like a booming cottage industry.

Perhaps the sadder commentary is … Read more

Zoho released its Notebook service today, better rounding off its suite of Web-based productivity tools. Zoho Notebook (more here) is really more like a scrapbook than a notebook. You can add spreadsheets and word processing files from your Zoho folders. Even more fun is Zoho's capacity to hold songs and video--as well as Web pages and RSS feeds--from a hard drive or from around the Internet.

The capability to share your stuff with other people makes Notebook a potentially cool tool for group projects at school or work. Chatting with other users in addition to recording and playing audio … Read more

Here's a new Web app that will knock you flat: Scrapblog. In development since last year, the site finally went public on Monday, April 2. It's a service for creating online multimedia packages, in particular, collections of photos and videos. As you might gather from the name, its designers want to deliver a level of flexibility that's similar to what you get when you're building a real-world scrapbook.

With Scrapblog, it's easy to place photos anywhere on a page, rotate them, crop them, and so on. The same for videos--but so far, you can get … Read more