This is an announcement long in the making: my wife and I have launched ScrapNova, a site dedicated to the art and community of scrapbooking.

If you're not aware, the scrapbooking industry is huge. As in $6.5B per year in retail sales huge, and growing upwards of 25% per year. Those are massive numbers, but what we found interesting is that even though scrapbookers spend a lot of time together on their craft, there really isn't a sense of community. There's not many places where scrapbookers can go to collaborate and share their ideas, so ScrapNova was created to fill that gap.

My wife has been an avid scrapbooker for several years and knows the industry inside and out, so much of the content is provided by her, such as the product reviews, the blog, and many of the items you'll find in the media galleries. She's super passionate about scrapbooking and has tons of ideas for growing the community and the site.

Me, well, I'm the guy behind the scenes making sure it all works. The site is using a build of the yet-to-be-released Community Server 2008, with the bits being somewhere after Beta 1 but before Beta 2. All is working well and is really stable. There's some great new features in CS 2008, such as activity logging (or social streams depending on who you talk to) and the newly re-done media galleries. Without CS 2008 we would not be launching ScrapNova today because it would have required much more custom work to do what we needed. But everything is there out-of-the-box and working smoothly.

We've been working on this for quite awhile. In fact, ScrapNova started out as something much different, but over time we realized this is the direction we wanted to go. We've already got some great content out there with more on the way.

So if you know of anyone who is into scrapbooking, tell them to check out ScrapNova. Better yet, tell them to join for added benefits, such as being able to participate in the discussions lists and being able to upload their own work to share with the world. There's absolutely no cost for ScrapNova and registering only take a few seconds.

And as with the launch of anything new, if you have any feedback at all, we'd love to hear it. Feel free to contact me or post to the feedback forum.

Similar Posts

1. TechEd 2005 Recap
2. Going Independent
3. Every Beginning Has An End (And Tattoos)