publishers

The midrange Web site design and hosting service SiteKreator (previous review) got an update recently. A new design theme called Aurora (available only to SiteKreator Power users for $39.95 a month), gives the Web manager a lot of design freedom while protecting him or her from egregious design errors.

Everything in the Aurora designs is integrated and color-matched, including art options: if you change your color scheme you get different choices for the image on your home page, as well as your typography selections. (Users of other plans, including the free version of SiteKreator, can still use SiteKreator templates, … 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

Tumblr blogging service, which launched last month, gives people the chance to publish brief or full-length, media-rich posts using their browser or mobile phone. It's a happy medium between a tidbit posting service, such as Twitter, and a full-fledged blogging tool, such as WordPress or Blogger. Tumblr is aimed at folks who feel they may not have enough content or time to write a full blog, yet still want to write and share links and media.

Each Tumblr user gets their own "Tumblelog," a short-form blog that contains one of six types of media: word posts, photos, videos, quotes, URLs, and IM conversations. Each type of content has its own visual style and corresponding form for publishing. It's delightfully simple, and within minutes you can add a wide range of content. There's also a bookmarklet for your browser's toolbar to post items without having to navigate to Tumblr's home page.

Tumblr comes with some pretty advanced options for power users. You can give your Tumblelog its own domain, and even set the length for stories on your RSS feed. There are five themes to pick from, and you can customize the color of every aspect of the interface. If you are integrating Tumblr into your blog or Web site, there's an option to paste in your CSS.

What really sets Tumblr apart is its speed. It's blazingly fast. According to founder David Karp, the service gets in excess of 10,000 posts an hour, something you can visually track using an in-house tool called Radar. Currently in alpha, it shows the last 20 pieces of content published to the service. It's a little bit like Digg's DiggSpy, but without autorefreshing.

If you're on the fence about blogging or just want an easy way to publish interesting tidbits you find while browsing, give Tumblr a try. Our semiofficial Tumbleblog can be found here.

Note: From 2003 to 2007, Tumblr creator David Karp was a partner and CTO of UrbanBaby.com, now owned by CNET Networks, publisher of Webware.com.… Read more

If I hear about one more highly focused social networking site, I'm going to explode. Or failing that, write a blog post. Every day, Webware gets pitched on at least one, and sometimes several, new social nets designed for particular demographics: Barack Obama supporters, lesbians, you name it. The new metasocial network service Ning is leveraging this trend by making it possible for anyone to start a network, just as easily as anyone can now launch their own blog.

People with traditional publishing backgrounds are looking at this trend and thinking that social networks could become the new special-interest … Read more

The series of tubes is rife with rich content, but a few companies are finding ways to let us print it on demand.

Do you skip right to the blank-inside greeting cards like I do? It's not just that I hate the contrived sentiments preselected for me, but I want the power to customize. Ink2 could be a good option for extreme customization.

Any content you find on the Web is game. Choose an image, slap it on a card, calendar, or postcard. Fiddle with the layout, pick your text, font, color, size, style, and position. Add a photo … Read more

When I was a kid, I had ambitions of becoming a legendary comic author like Stan Lee. The one thing holding me back from that dream (aside from my poor drawing skills) was distribution--how was I going to get people to look at my creations? HyperComics attempts to solve that dilemma for today's wanna-be Lees, with a free service that lets you browse and share amateur comic books.

HyperComics uses a flash-based browser to navigate and explore entire comic books. There are basic zoom and page navigation controls, along with a toggle that lets you switch between one and … Read more

Public relations megalith Edelman has launched a new Web-based tool to bring the press release, historically dry as a saltine, into the 21st century and the culture of Web 2.0. The tool, called StoryCrafter, can create "social media news releases" that incorporate RSS feeds, Digg and Delicious buttons, tags, talkback comments, and multimedia clips. The whole thing's a good idea, but it doesn't appear to be as well-executed as it could be: most noticeable for me was the fact that there's a lot of whitespace and consequently a lot of scrolling involved. Nevertheless, there'… Read more

At the Under the Radar conference on mobility yesterday, I hosted two panels on mobile apps. Execs from cellular phone carriers judged company pitches. I'll report later on the very cool session on digital imaging. But first, here's the rundown on four mobile Web access companies.

4Info is a mobile search service. Via SMS, you can query it to give you weather, movie times, stock prices, and so on. Just send simple words, such as movies, to 4Info (44636). The latest feature is a somewhat open platform that lets publishers quickly add content (such as blog feeds) to … Read more