When people ask what is distinct about Tabblo, one of the answers we often give is around our layout engine. It’s meant to be part personal art director, part free-form tool, and part easy publishing for photos, text, and styling elements, all through a standards-compliant web-browser interface. We spend a lot of time thinking hard about how to make it smoother, easier, and more powerful at the same time, so it’s really cool to see folks at Microsoft Research taking this concept to a whole new level with their recently announced Photosynth project.

Essentially a 3-D layout engine with a lot less art director and a lot more spacial mapper, Photosynth could be a very cool way of both presenting photos and organizing them as well.

Go check out the video– it’s very cool in that Minority Report-esque way.

Via: nonsmoking area

We’re happy to announce that after many many member requests, we have added search to the site so that stuff is more findable. You can get users, tabblos, or photos by text, tag, or name. Please help us give it a whirl.

Exciting though it is on its own, the really great improvement to Tabblo this week around search is the ability to find other stuff on the site that you can directly add to your own lightbox to help with your story-telling. Every search result that matches a photo has an “Add to lightbox” link (as does every photos-only page) that will conveniently add the photo to your lightbox for the purposes of using it in your own tabblos. Of course you need to have permission to use the photo in the first place, but one of the most exciting things to us about Tabblo community is how willing to share content you all are.

And when you do use someone else’s photos in your tabblos, they will receive props at the footer of your tabblo where the “photo credits” line goes along with a link back to their own profile page. A common theme among some of the most requested set of features on the site is better tools for collaboration on Tabblo, and we’re hoping that the nearly ubiquitous “add to the lightbox” link and the new photo credits are steps in that direction.

From sunsets to airplanes to just about anything else you can find on Tabblo, making stuff is very fun when you’ve got such great starting materials.

While working on Tabblo, we’ve spent the majority of our time on the editing/viewing experience around tabblos. They are our atoms, and as such we wanted to have an experience that was unparalleled.

One part of the site that we’ve neglected a little bit is each user’s homepage. Until today, this has been the place where people come to look at the list of tabblos that you’ve created, and the people you are close to on Tabblo. However, we’ve always known that this was a critical page to get right- after all, this is how others see you as a member of the community, as well as your own personal dashboard to Tabblo.

Today we’re taking the first step in the direction of enhancing the “My Tabblo” page in the direction of personal expression and communication by adding a “testimonials” section (inspired by the MySpace juggernaut) and a “personal statement” blurb that allows you say something to the rest of Tabblo about yourself.

Most people don’t realize that the My page on Tabblo is a little different than it is on other sites in that we compile on the fly specifically for the viewer requesting it. At the most basic level, this means that we let each viewer see only the list of tabblos he has been granted access to, but under the hood it means that we can really start to do neat collaborative stuff on top of the customization options we already have planned for the My page. So testify away, drop me a testimonial, and stay tuned for the forthcoming opportunities to make even more of your My page.

According to a Pew study most people do not blog for money but in order to express themselves, and when considering subjects, most prefer personal stories over covering politics, tech., etc.

This is music to our ears as we built Tabblo to facilitate story-telling with photos and words instead of just the latter. By including visuals in the story-telling process, we’re hoping to open up the web as a medium for a whole bunch of people who would say “huh?” if you offered them a blogging platform for self-expression but who have the same story-telling itch to scratch as most of today’s bloggers.

Another interesting nugget from the story is that 55% of bloggers write under a pseudonym. This could be because of the nature of the content, but our theory is that most blogging tools are too coarse-grained when it comes to who can view the stuff, and that as such, folks are sometimes left feeling “safer” under a pen name. In the case of Tabblo, this is why we’ve spent so much time tuning the access-control system. We know that it has caused some bumps and bruises along the way, but we’re hoping to continue to make it better for you so that none of you ever feel compelled to create your tabblos as “Publius.”

Meanwhile, let’s all get back to telling some stories…

Laurie Sullivan has an interesting take on Tabblo which argues that we are re-focusing on the “professional” market. This seems to suggest that we have somehow “given up” on regular folks but the reality is that we at Tabblo don’t believe in this amateur/professional split to begin with, and if there was anything the public beta did for us, it was only to cement the core belief that when you provide the right tools to “regular folks” you can get some pretty stunning results which can far outstrip the work of “the pros.”

On the Internet, we’re all creators, and we’re all amateurs. To talk about aiming something at “professionals” seems… well, sort of dated.