I spoke today with Carlos Garcia, CEO of Scrapblog.  I was intrigued by their product ever since having seen the DemoFall demo.  Basically, Scrapblog gives you tools to make an online scrapbook.  You can combine and artfully arrange photos, graphics, text, video and audio narration.  The scrapblog can then be shared online (with some community tools being built around that) privately or publicly, and it can be printed.  The prints are how Scrapblog aims to cash in.

The current beta version has 25,000 testers.  Only when the full version launches will the rich media tools be available to test.  This is due in January 2007.

Scrapblog is noteworthy for a few reasons.  First, a beautiful and intuitive user interface.  Carlos is a partner at an interactive marketing agency Nobox, whose partners are funding the development of Scrapblog.  In developing the product they have drawn on the expertise of the Nobox team for designing the UI, and it shows. 

Second, if Scrapblog manages to make rich media insertion easy and intuitive (I reserve judgment until I can play around with it in January), it will be a first, and I think a real draw.  When my family goes on trips these days, we use the same camera to generate short video clips as well as photos.  If we want to share them with family and friends, it makes perfect sense to do so in the same space. 

Last, with support for audio narration, text insertion and manipulation, and slide transitions, is Scrapblog your new Office 2.0 presentation application?  While Scrapblog’s potential as a competitor to social networking sites like MySpace has been mentioned by blogosphere greats, it has never been mentioned it in the same breath as ZohoShow, Empressr, or Thumbstacks.  I think it should be.  Each scrapblog page is really a slide, to which the user can bring text, images, and video.  You can share these slides and, most importantly, you will be able to narrate them.  We all know that slides alone don’t really convey the content of a presentation.  The voice-over is very important, and none of the current players enable that.

Of course, to be a true Office 2.0 contender, Scrapblog will have to beef up its offline capabilities – exporting is a must.  The ability for a third party to remix/edit content is also important.  Not that I recommend that Scrapblog make a conscious effort to go this route.  I don’t believe it is a good idea for a startup to divide its efforts in this way, and the consumer photo-sharing/social-networking world is very different from the small-business productivity world that is Office 2.0.

BTW - Empressr is also the creation of an interactive marketing agency, although comparing the Empressr UI to Scrapblog’s leaves a lot to be desired.  

Another BTW – Scrapblog has Flash on the front, but .NET and SQL server behind.