Scrapbooking and the new social media

This is Simple Scrapper’s 100th post!

If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely not living in a cave without any knowledge of the web 2.0 revolution. However, it’s possible you’re not quite sure what a lot of these new technologies can do for digital scrapbooking or digital designing. User-friendly and super-useful applications are adding to the niche once dominated exclusively by forums and Yahoo groups. This post will help you figure out which “hot new thing” is worth fitting into your already-busy digital life.

RSS Readers
Tools like Google Reader and Bloglines can help you keep track of all those sites you read all.the.time. (Like Simple Scrapper of course.) The tools allow you to compile all the new posts from every blog you enjoy. Nowadays all the shops and all the designers have blogs – don’t you want to be the first to know about sales, freebies and contests? All you need to do is sign up for one of these RSS (really simple syndication) readers and grab the feeds from your favorite blogs. Look for the little orange button that universally represents RSS.

Delicious
In these days, you likely use more than one computer. This leaves a conundrum of how to keep track of your favorite shops, forums, and tutorial sites. (See RSS Readers above for keeping track of blogs.) Delicious is what is know as a social bookmarking site. Using an easy-to-add “bookmarklet” you can quickly flag new sites to your profile, tagging each one with keywords to help you find them later. You can even search for those keywords to see what people like you are bookmarking.

Facebook
This social networking site used to just be for people you know IRL (in real life), but it has suddenly taken a new twist. With the growing surge of “fan pages”, you can support you favorite digiscrap shops. If you are a shop owner or designer, its super-duper-easy to create a new page that your friends can “fan”. Facebook is one way in which our real lives and real business are intersecting with our digital world.

Stumble Upon
As an innovative version of social bookmarking, Stumble Upon allows users to surf the user-generated web based on self-selected categories. Just click “stumble” and you’ll be transported to a new site. Vote yay or nay and move on. The real value here is in “stumbling” your favorite digital scrapbooking sites. By joining Stumble Upon and saying you “Like it” when reading a fantastic new blog post, you can help other web surfers find the same great content. The more your participate, the more you contribute to stumbling onto totally amazing Web content.

Twitter
Can you keep it short? Micro-blogging in 140 characters or less with Twitter is taking off like wildfire. Scrappers, designers, shop-owners and savvy creative women across the Web are sharing inspirations and building community in brief bursts of thought. Twitter is a fantastic way to follow (and start) trends as well connect with like-minded souls. Use a desktop application like TweetDeck to streamline the experience.

How are you using social media to connect with your fellow digital scrappers?