Given a piece of time and a piece of paper, we can stitch together a clear enough story in words. But give us a scrapbook and we can add much more to it. Pictures make storytelling a whole lot easier (and also more interesting).

Now, let’s take this entire argument and give it the platform of the World Wide Web. Given a choice between starting a text-only blog or a multimedia showcase, which one would be the easier pick? I think you would head towards multimedia.

If you want to bring in the coolness of multimedia to your story, take a look at Panraven.

Panraven is like a free online scrapbook that helps us tell our stories in pictures, videos, sound and of course, words. But you will also discover that Panraven is more than a digital scrapbook that helps with photo-stories.

With Panraven, The Story Begins With Rich Media

After you log in, this is the first screen you will see in your account. Bunch all of your media into Panraven with any of the options that’s provided for it. There’s Panraven’s own app and one made for Picasa. Or you can upload it from your HDD or directly from Flickr.

I chose Flickr and so my Flickr photostream opens up in Panraven’s media window for some organization and final editing. Before that the media has to be imported into Panraven. Panraven gives 1GB of storage space for your media needs.

With the editor, a range of touch-ups and special effects can be applied.

The media window is also the window to shared albums and public photos. Panraven encourages sharing with a dedicated Friends tab.

This is a powerful feature because you can collectively share in experiences like a trip taken or the recent birthday party. The circle of friends can pool in their content to create a really rich photo story, like a large and collaborative free online scrapbook.

Time For Story Telling

With the photos gathered up, it’s time to start weaving it all into a story.

You might reach a roadblock after a “˜Once upon a time in a distant land”¦’, but Panraven ensures you reach a happy ending with its step by step approach. Here’s how the big picture looks like”¦

Choosing a story type is about choosing the right look for your kind of story. Consider what your story is going to be all about and click on one of the many options that are provided. If undecided, you can opt for a Freeform style. Each story type also has many Styles that give you the final styling for your photo story. You can check them out in their thumbnail previews.

From this starting point, it’s now about choosing the content from your media sets that you want to put in the story. A quick feature is Autofill“¦use it to specify the number of images you want in each page.

The Story Editor is the first canvas for applying some creativity. Panraven provides all the tools arranged around your “˜storyboard’.

You can continue with some more personal touches like an audio background in the next stage (Online Options). An audio narration could be more helpful in taking the viewers through the photo story.

Story telling is about sharing it with an audience. The audience can be the readers of your blog, your social community, your circle of friends, and the Panraven community. The final stage addresses all this with the many social sharing options.

My first attempt at a Panraven photo story was an attempt at learning the ropes. The flair of creativity will take some more doing. But if you really want to check out the potential of Panraven as an artist’s canvas for appealing photo stories check out the cool public stories (like this one here). Some of them are literally like coffee table books.

Does The Panraven Story Have A Happy Ending?

There are many ways to share your life stories online with a photo album or free online scrapbook. Panraven is just one of the more eye catching ways. It makes the creative process a breeze with easy to configure templates and helpful instructions every step of the way.

The auto-fill feature that can fill up the pages with photos automatically is just the thing for newbies. You just have to pick the right media file and the sequence you want to show it in. Even before signing up, you can view the public stories and get the picture. Panraven also offers the photo stories as printed books at a cost.

As a free web application, would you let Panraven tell your story to everyone? Let us know”¦

From my writer’s point of view, crafting science fiction is as exciting as – and so much even more challenging than – reading it . The science behind every great science fiction is always based on the real science that really exists in our real world. That’s why making the story believable requires an extensive amount of research.

But science fiction is not the only genre that requires research. Any kind of writing involves some process of data gathering. That’s why research tools  are  an indispensable part of every writer’s life.

Scrap everything to Scrapbook

One of the best research tools that I’ve come across so far is a Firefox extension called Scrapbook. Basically, this tool acts as a filing cabinet for all of your digital research data. Whenever you find something interesting on the net, you could add it to your scrapbook, either by dragging and dropping, right clicking or using shortcut keys.

We’ve discussed Scrapbook before. If want to get familiar with it, you could read Tina’s “Offline Browsing Anywhere Anytime ““ Part One” and my “7 Writing Addons for Turning Firefox into the Ultimate Writer’s Suite“.

One reader suggested Scrapbook+, a modification of Scrapbook with some improvements here and there. But with the exception of the highly visible 6 highlighters, I personally couldn’t spot the differences between these two. I use the plus version based on the developer’s claim that it’s faster.

As much as I love Scrapbook+ and Scrapbook to aid my research, they both have one similar major drawback: my data is only available on one computer. If you are a person who works with more than one computer (home, office, mobile, library, and any other possible variation), you’d wish that you could share your data from every one of your working points.

Well, my dear friends, with some modification and a little help from another tool, your wish could come true.

Access your Scrapbook data everywhere

My other indispensable tool is a data backup/synchronization service called Dropbox (which, again, has been mentioned previously here and here).

After installing the client (available for Windows, Mac and Linux), this service will create a Dropbox folder and everything inside this folder will be synchronized to your online account and to other Dropbox folders in other computers which installed under your account. It’s also possible to share folders with other Dropbox users.

As time has gone by, I found other uses of Dropbox aside from being a mere backup tool. One of them is using it to remote trigger file and torrent downloads. While trying to find a solution to have my research data available on other computers, I suddenly realized that I could use Dropbox to achieve that goal.

The first thing to do is to create a folder inside the Dropbox folder to put your Scrapbook data. Mine’s called “Scrapbook” but you could name it anything you want.

If you install the Dropbox client on several computers under one account, you can continue on to the Scrapbook setting up process. However, if this is not the case and you still want to be able to access your Scrapbook data from another computer, right click on the Scrapbook folder and choose “Dropbox –> Share this folder” from the pop up menu.

You will be taken to the Dropbox site under your account. Write down the email addresses of the Dropbox accounts to whom you want to share this folder with. These accounts would be the accounts of computers where you want to access your Scrapbook data.

This arrangement opens up another possibility: you could collaborate with others on data collecting.

Configuring Sharing on Scrapbook

The next step is configuring Scrapbook. Open Scrapbook using the key combination Alt + K and click the little arrow button next to Tools. Choose “Options” from the po up menu.

Choose the “Organize” tab and click the “Save data to” option. Click “Browse” to determine where Scrapbook should put your data. Choose the “Scrapbook” folder inside the Dropbox folder.

Please note that from my experiment, the above method is working with a fresh install of Scrapbook but not with an already built database. Alternatively, you could choose “Enable Multi-ScrapBook” to have several sets of data collections. This way, you could put your private data on one local location and share non-private data through the Dropbox folder.

Click the little arrow next to the “Multi Scrapbook” icon on the left of Tools and choose manage.

On the next Scrapbook management window, you could Add, Edit and Remove a scrapbook. Click Add.

Give a name to the new scrapbook and choose a location to save the data. Since our goal is to make the data available on other computers, choose the Scrapbook folder inside the Dropbox folder that we’ve created earlier.

Do the same thing on the other computers: accept the Dropbox shared folder if it’s installed under a different account, and set Scrapbook (either using “Save data to” or “Multiple Scrapbook“) to store its data in the shared Dropbox folder.

Another solution for sharing partial Scrapbook data is using the “Export – Import” feature from the Tools menu.

The combination of Scrapbook and Dropbox will enable us to work using the same data on multiple computers under different OS’s as both Firefox and Dropbox are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Just remember to pay attention to your Dropbox quota and the size of your Scrapbook library.

I also do not have time to attend scrapbooking parties (yeah, they have these), and I sure do not have the time to visit hobby stores searching through racks and racks of scrapbooking templates trying to decide which one looks best. Phew, it tires me out just thinking about it.

No, I am an internet geek, so what better way to try my hand at scrapbooking than with a digital scrapbook. I looked around at all the free products and free template sites, but none of them impressed me until I found Scrapblog. I recently used Scrapblog to put together a beautiful and custom scrapbook of my son’s school career and I wanted to share with you how insanely easy it was to do.

I began by signing up for the service to open my free account. From there you just click “Create a new scrapbook” and you are on your way. You have the choice of starting with a theme or starting with a blank page. I, of course, elected to start with a theme.

Scrapblog offers hundreds of templates and dozens of categories, such as weddings, school, holidays, sports, and even military. I selected the school theme and this loaded up the Scrapbook builder with ten scrapbook pages that I could customize.

Even though it was better than anything I could have created from scratch, there were certain things about the first kindergarden page I did not like. No problem. I was able to use the very intuitive editor to move around the page elements and then add my own photos. The result (below) took me only a few minutes to create.

Once I had completed all the pages, I was able to publish the scrapbook with one click. This created a URL that I can share with family and friends. I can even print the pages and paste them into my own physical scrapbook.

All in all, it was very easy and I think the results are fantastic.

Why not try it yourself and let us know in the comments what you think.   Maybe you also know some other scrapbooking websites or apps that you would like to recommend?