According to Creating Keepsakes Magazine (who, admittedly, might have a vested interest in showing big numbers), the 2004 SIA survey estimates annual scrapbooking industry sales at $2.551 billion, representing a 27.8 percent increase from 2001. They also say:

• There are 4.4 million new scrapbooking households since 2001, for a total of over 26 million households and 32.1 million scrapbookers. That's almost ten times the number of people playing World of Warcraft, which makes this big.

• Spending on scrapbooking supplies by households that scrapbook has increased 6.3 percent to $96.76 annually since 2001.

• Almost one in four, or 24.5 percent of U.S. households, participate in the hobby of scrapbooking, with Western states showing the most households involved in the hobby (between 26--31 percent of households).

With numbers like these, we figured an article was in order. In fact, it seemed to make the most sense for us to kick off our coverage of this topic with a Site of the Month that itself seems to have many resources for scrapbookers.

That's why this month's Site of the Month is ScrapJazz's digital scrapbooking directory, at (http://www.scrapjazz.com/links/Computer_Resources/Digital_Scrapbooking/) and shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


Once you get past the ads, there are many useful links. Roll over picture for a larger image.

If you're interested in scrapbooking, you might also know that there's a sub-category of this hobby dedicated to building scrapbooks digitally, using some of the photo-related tools we've all come to know and love.

What we liked about this site is we found a links directory of 121 digital scrapbooking-related sites and Web pages. Now, not all of them are great resources (and the first six links were ads), but there were enough gems in the list to make Scrapjazz.com work bookmarking. And that's why they're the lucky recipient of Connected Photographer's Site of the Month award.

If you're a scrapbooking fan and would like to write for Connected Photographer about digital scrapbooking, send an email to editor@ZATZ.com. For this topic, we definitely need the contribution of some of you experts out there.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.