A Good Idea, Out from Under Me Again

This must happen a lot out there - you have a good idea, and then find someone else has just done it. [Picture the sound of slapping on head].

For the last few weeks, I’ve been collecting together links to free and paid-for online content management systems which provide wikis and other functions, with the thought to move all of my links over to a digital scrapbooking wiki, and allow others to edit and add to it. What I had pictured was something I was willing to sink funds into (whilst I have some, that is) and something a little bigger than the below, but it looks like Tracy has bet me to it. :-p

Digital Scrap Wiki, founded by Tracy, has just invited me to participate, and it’s setup on Wetpaint. It looks like Jen Strange has an invite too - more on that later.  Tracy has put a heck of a lot of thought into the arrangement, and the Wetpaint format looks good. I recommend you take a look at it.

My Sad Dream

As Tracy points out, there are a lot of great digiscrappers out there, putting a lot of hard work and effort into gathering material, providing forums, listing links to help out the digital world.

Jen Strange is one of them - her website contains a plethora of articles and suggestions, links and lists - and I’ve noticed she has recently even incorporated an allowance to put the pages into PDF format. Great!  And please don’t kick me here Jen (although you are most welcome to), but sometimes all those resources are difficult to find on the Jen Strange site, because there are so many subsidiary pages. And they come under a named site, so searching through google sometimes doesn’t find something. She’s got everything from a designer list somewhere, to a completely different blog on digital piracy, to a great list of acronyms and abbreviations - hidden somewhere onsite. There’s also a multiple layout blog (as there is elsewhere).

The Everyday Digital Scrapbooking blog is another great example. The blog, setup by a team of people, appears to concentrate on tutorials with a newsletter, and some coupons. It has a design team picked also.

Of course, Kim Hill set up a non-related to any store site for tutorials - DigiScrapping Tutorials.  

Digiscrap Info was a blog recently setup by Heidi and Connie, but I notice it’s now moved over into wiki format itself for some parts, and because Connie took on all the ACDSee Photo Manager queries and became the appointed champion of this, the blog is heavily centred on ACDSee.

Digi News Now requested signup to regular newsletters - which I’ve never received.  It also has one of those rank-listing sites associated, where you see all those hundreds of Top No. blinkies peppering all sorts of sites.

There’s Bree’s Just Digital Calls - a website setup to allow advertising of team calls, contests etc.  

I absolutely love Melissa Goerke’s Digi Pick of the Day 

DiscTalk Radio - the broadcasting website, kind of put me off with it’s coast to coast motto - I’m across the world. But nevertheless, it’s a great site for information and the broadcasts. 

There are the two promo sites - Promos4DigiScrappers, and Digital Scrapbook Previews 

And many many more….

Now, do you get my point here? Every month, someone else out there opens a resource blog or site within the industry, perhaps because they see a need, perhaps because they think they can offer something new to the industry. But for those of us who have been doing this for some time - Jen Strange, Melissa G, Kim Hill for her tutorials website, then we know one big thing about this - it takes a lot of dedication and hard work, and a lot of passion for the business.

Most of the above are NOT selling us something tangible, only information. The vast majority of the sites above are reliant on sponsorship from digital design stores and designers. The sponsorship keeps their website going, bandwidth up, and ISP etc happy. That’s how they survive. In essence,  they are selling you that information, and I presume hoping to make some money out of it on the side, to make up for all their hard efforts.

Just to emphasise my point here, here’s a link to my own links list.  These links are slowly being moved off this blog, and are shared with you freely. I don’t have sponsorship, and it does take time to amalgamate those links and I also check for dead links - this literally takes many months to put together. At last count, my digital stash links (to the online stores) contains 233 links - to live retail stores. Overall, I (currently) own (if you can call it that) or manage over 2500 links for scrapbooking - all shared freely with yourselves. Of the digital resources links (some of which are mentioned above) there are 122 links. Of these, approximately 40% of them come and go - people open up blogs or websites, then they close them down again. Perhaps of those listed above, one or two are yet to disappear.

There are SO many resource sites out there. 

? How confusing must this be to the new online searcher, simply hoping to find some information about that new fangled digital scrapbooking hobby they’re interested in? There appears to be nothing like a one stop shop in this world of digital.  

So, my picture or silly little dream was to create a website which included regular news, articles, reveiws, a wiki to support these types of links and resources under relevant categories, easily searchable, and with columnists like myself and people like Jen Strange - pointing people to the latest news and views, and to forums like Digishop Talk and others for chatting. An online newsite, views site, and all links site - all digital resource links under the same site, pointing the user to the relevant site out there. And one which would easily give sponsors a one-stop shop to support. And that was something I was prepared to spend time, money and effort on to setup. A Dream world called All Things Digital Scrapbooking, with a fantastic Editorial team who actually earnt a living doing what they were naturally doing anyway. Ezine like, daily news, links to the latest blog content out there, revolving editorials, and easily searchable.

No google adverts, no missing feature lists - simple information, respected opinions, and guidance to all those sites out there. 

Tracy’s wiki might do it. Check it out.  

Comments

[Jen Strange]

yeah, I know things are hard to find on my site. but those subcategories the only way I could figure to keep things organized. It makes perfect sense to ME, but that's because I decided which categories would go where. :) Not sure how to fix it. hee

almost everything you need to find is under the "resources" tab. you have to use the menu at left after you click on a tab. A lot of what you're probably looking for is in the "cool resources" link in that menu.

Designer's List and Stop Piracy blog are easily found through the tabs at the top, and the Layouts blog is linked in the "Connections" link on the bottom left.

and no, I won't kick you. it's all good. :)

[Michelle@Scrapability]

Well, I'm glad I didn't get a kicking, but what I was trying to say was that as these sites grow, the information gets harder and harder to find - especially if setup initially as a blog.

Blogs were the thing that gave everyone the ability to setup websites quickly and with ease, with a good categorisation in two things - date chronology and tags / categories. What they are especially good at is not providing a great search facility - especially if you don't even know something exists that you may be looking for in the first place.

Many of the resource websites listed above started off small, and with a lot of hard slog, the resources available are huge - they're just all over the web.

[Heidi]

I have to agree with you. Connie and I have a wealth of information about organizing your digital kits and have spent a lot of time trying to find the best format for this. I find info contained in blog's hard to find after you write it. That why we have both a blog and wiki (main site). We try link users where to find the info (blog, main site, forum, FAQ) to get the user's to discover the information themselves. Granted we have own niche of information. Connie and I too have pondered how to connect all these resources together? There is wealth of information scattered all over. Let us know if we can help. Our goal too is to get information about digital scrapping to the users.

BTW, Your link to the Digital Scrap Wiki doesn't work.

[Susan White]

I agree the blog format is good for daily posts and for someone like me who doesn't do HTML, a blog is wonderful. But I find it hard to find things on my own blog too - especially if I want to edit it. Maybe the blogging sites will read this and come up with something - - - the idea of managing another online thing is ...well...daunting. I find Jen Strange's site easy to navigate - maybe we think alike?? LOL But I do like your dream....

[Julie Ann Shahin]

Thanks for mentioning Everyday Digital Scrapbooking!!!

[Maggie]

Hi Thank you for mentioning Every day digital project.
Our goal is to inspire and make the process very simple to create.

Have a blessed week,
Maggie

[Susan Rodriguez]

I had to come over and thank you for mentioning Everyday Digital Scrapbooking. I do writing tutorials that are very simple to understand and do hope to inspire all that read the blog. :-)

Susan

[Tracy]

I am now feeling really bad, I had no idea and definately didn't want to take your good idea. =( I love your ideas and love your dream. While I spent some time setting up the format, I am not above changing it around. I really want it to be something that is owned by the community and not by me. So all of your great ideas could happen there. I can't fix the google ads issue though, that is the deal with Wetpaint. But I will happily make you a moderator or even admin which would give you some serious control over the wiki to start implementing the dream you had.

Thanks for writing about it and I hope you will go ahead and make it want you wanted it to be.

The link is www.digitalscrapwiki.com - hopefully that works.

Thanks again.
Tracy (aka tallynt)

[Michelle@scrapability]

Tracy, I'll write to you - you put this into implementation before me, so there's no problem there at all, but I'm actually creating something currently which should take all my links off site, and into a professional wiki to allow me to do this (and administer in case of spam, etc) - what I don't want to end up doing is recreating it on two sites. Email coming, when I get out of work.

PS - don't you think the digital world is brilliant?!