Well, I guess the cat is out of the bag. Yes, I accepted …

First off, I’d like to say that I’m very
flat­tered about Shel’s intro­duc­tion of me
in his blog. I
had the dis­tinct plea­sure of din­ing with Shel about a week ago and really enjoyed our con­ver­sa­tion. He is
as smart as he is nice … and it says on his busi­ness card: “Writer.
Speaker. Con­sul­tant. Nice Guy.” Rightly so ;) Thank you, Shel, I look
for­ward to work­ing with you. As David says, ” Shel Israel has a way of attract­ing some of the most inter­est­ing start-ups…”

Well, I heart Scrap­blog.

I first tried it out in the mid­dle of last year when I met Car­los at our Refresh­Mi­ami
meet­ings. I then returned to cre­ate more scrap­blogs dur­ing the year and
would speak to Car­los at our meet­ings to under­stand what he was
try­ing to achieve.Scrapblog is one of the more promi­nent Miami-based
star­tups and I was curi­ous to see how it would evolve.
Was it a “Photoshop-online” appli­ca­tion? Was it a photo-sharing
appli­ca­tion? Was it a photo-hosting and print­ing appli­ca­tion? What was
his vision?

But mostly, I was
curi­ous to see if Scrap­blog would incor­po­rate community-building fea­tures into the user expe­ri­ence. I’m an early Flickr user and saw it evolve from a flash-based chat envi­ron­ment to the web-based com­mu­nity it is today (see Jesse James Garrett’s inter­view for a brief his­tory of Flickr).
And Scrap­blog is in many ways sim­i­lar: it is also a flash-based
appli­ca­tion that has started to incor­po­rate web-based
community-building features.

My title was defined by the com­mu­nity. And my role will be about lis­ten­ing to it and serv­ing it. As Car­los says, “The user rules. And, col­lec­tively, the com­mu­nity of users is the
author­ity in defin­ing and direct­ing the con­tin­ued devel­op­ment of a
ser­vice.“
My role will be to under­stand users’ needs and to advo­cate fea­tures
that will cre­ate a bet­ter col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence. I hope to be able to
fill that tall order.

And I can already say that work­ing at Scrap­blog means join­ing a won­der­ful team that I’m proud to be a part of.

Tech­no­rati Tags: she­lis­rael, scrap­blog, car­los­gar­cia, david­parmet