What is the next big trend in scrapbooking?
Botanicals? Birds? Eco-friendly paper?
Try Glogster.
Launched in January, this online gallery of “glitter blogs” allows users to drop and drag photos, music, text, videos and other images to create a colorful medley of self expression. Each page or poster is called a Glog and users are encouraged to share them, rate them and embed them elsewhere.
Glogster combines the principles of scrapbooking and social networking, and targets the teen and tween markets. “Reach for the sky of expression” is the site’s motto and its young and communicative users have taken it to heart, creating visually stunning and emotionally charged glogs about anorexia, self-mutilation, abusive fathers and first love.
“Young people say they don’t scrapbook, but everything they post online is an expression of themselves, whether it’s a quote or lyrics or photos,” said Lisa Hansen, of West Jordan. She’s an office administrator, scrapbooker and mother of YouTube junkies. So she has great insight into organization, memory preservation and the allure of the Internet.
Hansen, a one-time consultant for Close to My Heart, agrees the future of scrapbooking is Facebooking. Her concern is that all of that creativity will be lost or erased.
Life is becoming one big inbox and the digital

age, for all its promise of expanded memory, is conditioning us to refresh, delete, discard and empty without much thought to what we’re throwing away.
What we need, what our kids need, are convenient ways to capture and share our experiences, ideas and memories, and the good sense to save them.

For grown-ups too: Michelle Ferrier has been studying the idea of digital ethnography for years, first as an instructor at Emory & Henry College in rural Virginia, then as creator of digitalstoryquilt.com, and now as curator of the Central Florida community Web site mytopiacafe.com.
I first met Ferrier in May at a mashup of journalists, technologists and innovators held at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. She was vaguely familiar with modern scrapbooking but immediately could see how her newest project might be marketed to hobbyists and family history buffs.
Ferrier has designed a Web site that puts life in thematic context, a place where people create portable, digital narratives, categorized by family, community, entertainment, ancestry, nature and professional disciplines.
Her prototype is based on the charm quilt concept where no one square uses the same fabric. There’s a “stitching” mechanism that allows people to create threads, links and tags; a “scrap bag” for adding photos, video and audio; a “listening post” social networking feature; and drop-and-drag editing. In other words, Glogster for grown-ups.
“I see quilts as not only a visualization tool, but as a way to create identity, sense of community, advocacy, legitimacy and to give voice to the voiceless,” Ferrier says, noting that quilting bees historically have fostered female empowerment.
Based on the Glogs I’ve seen, our girls could use a little sisterhood. Their pain and anger belies the High School Musical tone of the Glogster home page. The feeling behind their posters, while dark and maudlin, is so much more real than what I see in magazines and Web sites devoted to scrapbook trends.
So if this is the future of scrapbooking, I’m all for it.