The service, at collagewall.com, offers templates for dragging and dropping digital images, but custom collages are possible, too.
The sites offer templates and step-by-step instructions for creating classified ads and then post the ads, sometimes free, on all the major listings services.
Postlets currently offers templates for auto and real estate ads, with employment listings soon to come, followed by personals and other categories.
For those who want to make a fully customized game, Microsoft offers templates via its Home Magazine site that allow you to design your own games using Excel and Word.
It offers templates for about 200 designs, the ability to add and edit pictures and publish and update text without having to program in HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, the technical lingua franca of Web sites.
According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.
They offer templates that can be borrowed and adapted; they teach a writer how to create narrative structures and characters, how to develop tension, write dialogue, and maintain a consistent tone and pitch.
More than once, to get you started, Barry offers templates of a bunny, a bat, a bird and a pair of I-don't-know-whats, urging the reader to cut, copy, trace, color and paste.
(With the new iPhone and the advent of short-text delivery services like Twitter, American cellular habits are becoming increasingly Japanese; there are at least two U.S. sites, Quillpill and Textnovel, both in the beta stage, that offer templates for writing and reading fiction on cell phones).
The JPMorgan-Bear arrangement, and the Bank of America Countrywide match before it, may offer templates that allow the Federal Reserve to achieve something beyond basic search-and-rescue efforts: taking some air out of the enormous bubble in the credit insurance market and zapping some of the speculators who have caused it to inflate so wildly.
