More neat stuff

I skipped over YourMinis, not wanting to install anything new. I love gadgets and widgets, but I try to restrict them to my iGoogle page (on which I have three tabs to keep all of my gadgets, like my Google Reader, Gmail, Google Bookmarks, Google Notebook, etc.). I went on to Photobucket, which differs from Flickr in that you can post anyone's content to your site (generally embedded, like a YouTube video).

What's neat about Photobucket is that it allows you to upload photos, videos, and other animations for sharing over the web. For embedding images and videos, I think it's much easier than Flickr--the tools are more like YouTube's. Though there doesn't seem to be a filter for searching--a few of the photos I saw when searching "dressage" were a bit sketchy.

Scrapblog is really fun and cool. I made a quick scrapblog:

I like that it costs nothing, looks great, very easy, doesn't make a mess like real scrapbooking. However, it doesn't look like you can print your pages, which doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me. Still, the templates are stunning, and it's got all the web 2.0 social tools like sharing, embedding, and RSS feeds.

Letterpop

I'm following Charlotte-Mecklenburg's Learning 2.1 in my aggregator and tried out Letterpop. Very easy to create a simple newsletter--the templates are a bit simplistic, but it's very easy to print or email your newsletter. Again, web 2.0 allows the creator to focus on content, not form. (Yes, sometimes form is part of the content, but as a democratizing publishing tool, web 2.0 tools are pretty decent.)