It didn't take long for the crafters of the world to join the social media revolution. In part two of a series on how crafts are joining the world of 2.0, you'll learn all about the increasingly popular world of digital scrapbooking. Scrapbooking the old fashioned way with pens, paper, and glue has been around for ages, but digital scrapbooking has taken the hobby in a new direction: it's greener, it's easier to access, it's more portable, and in some cases, cheaper.

The idea behind digital scrapbooking is that you purchase the papers, elements, image borders, and alphabets from online retailers and reuse them later, rather than purchasing things you can only use once.

You put everything together with Photoshop (or something similar and less expensive) and send your images to get printed up, and you put them in a scrapbook nice and neatly. Less mess, less fuss.

Some of the digital scrapbooking stores have galleries with samples from their featured scrapbookers, and many digital scrapbooking sites offer collections each month that have one cohesive theme.

Kits can range from $1 to $16, depending on how much you get with them. Which, if you think about it, is kind of expensive for these graphics, but you're paying for an extremely high quality file that can be reused as much as you like. With paper scrapbooking, you have to buy multiples, and it can get extremely expensive the more you get into the hobby.

The appeal to digital scrapbooking is easy to see for me: I don't have to cut up little bits and constantly rearrange things. I don't have to pre-order prints of my photos, only to discover they're a little too dark, light, big, small, or maybe they should be black and white. Plus, I have cats. They like to eat glitter stickers.

I'm not the kind of person who can sit and cut up things, and write fancy letters consistently. I've always said "I'd scrapbook if you could do it on the computer." And now I can!

Digital scrapbooking isn't faster than scrapping the old fashioned way: if anything, it takes longer, because nothing you do is permanent.

While digital scrapbooking has been around for awhile, the number of high quality sites has increased over the past year. Women are making careers out of designing things to sell in digital scrapbooking stores.

Digital scrapbooking is not limited to making scrapbooking pages to print and file away. You can make desktop calendars for your family members with pictures of your baby instead of inundating them with weekly emails. You can make greeting cards for the various holidays.

Aside from its creative benefits, digital scrapbooking helps you to consciously help the environment by not using as much paper. You only print what you need and what you like, there's not unnecessary excess of paper, glue, and little glitter stickers.

Of course, there are some downsides to digital scrapbooking. Your pages won't have dimensions, no matter how good of a job the designer does putting shadows on the buttons, strings, and bows you use. Of course, this is easy to fix by adding them to the finished product.

Some people will always be paper scrapbookers, just like some people will never adapt to ebooks, or typing their papers rather than handwriting them first.

Some stores to visit if you're interested in digital scrapbooking:
- The Lily Pad
- We Are Storytellers
- Little Dreamers Designs
- Oscraps
- The Shabby Shoppe