Scrapbook maker Scrapblog strutted its stuff at the We Media conference last month, went off the grid, and finally came back online today.
Scrapblogs are Flash-based slide shows made up of pages of photo or video layouts you can jazz up with a myriad of designs and effects. Transitions can be added between each page and you can set the mood with some background music as your show plays. You can publish a Scrapblog publicly or by invite only and embed it as well. If you choose, viewers can leave Flickr like embedded comments on key spots of the show.
Scrapblog’s editor is a flash application, which may make a lot of you cringe, but not for good cause. Scrapblog, as we’ve mentioned before, has one of the most natural feels of any online application out there. It’s full screen and closely mimics the design of a Windows desktop application.
Creating a Scrapblog starts with a creation wizard that lets you pick one of 19 different design themes to frame your pages of photos. You can then cover this canvas with by dragging and dropping in photos, clipart, shapes, text, and even videos. Each of these media objects can be hyperlinked, overlayed, resized, rotated, and edited along several parameters.
Photos are given special treatment and support frames, shadows, as well as that quintessential web 2.0 effect, reflections. Photos can be pulled from your computer, Photobucket, Yahoo Photos, Flickr, and WebShots. Video, on the other hand, is drawn solely from YouTube. After you’ve laid out the pages, you can choose from 12 different transitions between them and from 22 different songs to play along with the show.
Photo slide shows are a crowded space which includes the 38 million user giant, Photobucket, along with two newer players, RockYou and Slide, bringing in tens of millions in financing. Like FlipTrack, however, Scrapblog keeps a distinct niche by offering a more richly designed presentation less like a series photos and more like a hipper version of Powerpoint.
http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer_embed.swf?embed=1&scrapblogID=297
