On Sunday afternoon Scott McLeod sent a Tweet my way to tell me to check out The New Hive. And as I have tremendous respect for Scott’s work and opinions, I knew that I had to give The New Hive a good look.

The New Hive is a new service that allows you to create online collages of your favorite media and text. It’s a bit like Glogster without templates and bubbly artwork predefined for you and it’s free unlike Glogster which used to be free. The New Hive provides a blank canvas that you can design with images, videos, audio files, and text. You can quickly re-size and re-position the elements on your pages by draggin and dropping them. The pages that you create on The New Hive can be made public or private.

The New Hive is still in an invite-only beta phase so you will have to request an invitation to try it out. While you are waiting for your invitation, check out the gallery of public The New Hive creations including this one of Dr. Seuss and this one about MCA (I included that one just for the folks of my generation who enjoyed the Beastie Boys).

Applications for Education
I was disappointed to see Glogster slowly eliminate their free offerings, but I understand that they have to make money too. The New Hive could be a good alternative to Glogster for teachers who cannot purchase Glogster licenses. I also like that The New Hive has a little cleaner interface  for users to work on.