ReadWriteWeb

We love site-building and story-telling applications, and social webizens love sharing their content - particularly multimedia content - in new and compelling ways.

YouTellYou is a fun and simple tool that allows users to grab, annotate, tag and share their pictures in an online magazine-type format. Users can pull in photos from Smugmug, Facebook, Flickr or one's own computer, then go to town in a frenzy of sequences, captions and true pictorial story-weaving.

It's too often that we read about a startup with an intriguing idea only to be completely turned off by the bland-looking design of their website. Granted, we don't all have the Jedi-like abilities it takes to create a snazzy logo or website, so when we need something designed, we outsource it to a graphic designer - and there are tons to choose from.

In most cases, the company in need will look over a selection of designers, review portfolios, and pick one to come up with a design. But why only choose to employ the abilities of one designer when you can crowdsource the project and pick from an unlimited number of submissions from a vast community of designers?

The controversial but still successful crowdSPRING does just that.

In a recent post, we highlighted a few awesome resources for building websites, both personal and professional, without needing a lot of geekcore coding knowledge.

We omitted many sites in this roundup of personal favorites, and one such startup contacted us directly to make a case for their site. We followed up, and what we found was one of the easiest tools we've seen for creating truly multimedia sites with photo galleries, audio players, slide shows, RSS feeds, and more. Read on to learn more about Jimdo.

We've all seen a great deal lately of two trends: Personal website creation made simple (here's our favorite four resources of the moment) and social media aggregation services that pool all a user's streams and networking information.

Today, TinyChat creator Dan Blake along with cohorts Oliver Turbis and Joshua Gigg have announced the launch of a new freemium-model service that combines good-looking personal sites with users' existing social media data, and all in a mercifully lightweight format that's as easy to digest as it is quick to set up. Although the service, called Card.ly, is reminiscent of Retaggr or Chi.mp, it humbles the competition by delivering a simpler, more focused result. Blake et al. apparently understand the old adage, "Less is more."

Zimplit is the "open source web creation tool for dummies," according to Mattias Lepp, the company's executive leader. "Our team doesn't know anything about the web and software. Oliver Pulges is chemist, Silver Sikk is philologist, and I am old music orchestra conductor. This gives us unique advantage to see and make software for normal people, not for programmers."

As commerce, socialization, creativity, and identity become increasingly digitized and uploaded, the number of non-technical, "normal people" who need free, simple web design solutions increases. And for allowing non-techies to create quick, customizable, easily editable pages, Zimplit is a good resource. If you're too skilled for tools like Zimplit, keep it in your back pocket for the next time someone asks you to build a website and you'd really rather not.

In Web 1.0 there were a number of browser-based website creation platforms - e.g. Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, Homestead and Brinkster (I myself used nearly all of those, back in the day). These apps were very popular in the mid to late 90's, because they made web publishing relatively easy. The most successful one, Geocities, was eventually acquired by Yahoo! in 1999. Do these tools still exist, in the Web 2.0 era?