Yes! Orkut now allows rich HTML in scraps. Official Announcement came a bit late:

Sending scraps to friends has always been the most popular way to stay in touch on orkut. Despite having only colored text and smilies to play with, you have gotten creative and left some pretty impressive ASCII art in each other’s scrapbooks over the past few years. So, we’ve listened to your requests: and over the next week we’re rolling out a feature that will let you to express yourself by leaving rich content scraps for your friends. You can upload photos, enter HTML code or URLs, and the content will appear in your friend’s scrapbook.

You can catch a glimpse of the updated formatting page on orkut and know exactly what all you can do with this feature.

» Add images

Copy and paste urls ending in .jpg, .gif, .png or .bmp and the image will appear in the scrap. for example, http://example.com/example.jpg

» Add videos from YouTube and Google Video

Copy and paste the url and the video will appear in the scrap. for example, http://youtube.com/watch?v=videoid

» Add podcast/audio

Copy and paste the url of an audio file and an audio player will appear in the scrap. for example, http://example.com/example.mp3

» Add html-embeddable objects

Create or upload your content at sites such as photobucket.com, imageshack.com, rockyou.com or slide.com. Copy and paste the html embed code to share it with your friends.

Gaurav Dua – Orkut Guru – 539 Points
22, Webmaster and Businessman. Based in Jammu, J&K – India
Gaurav has written 507 Articles, posted 322 Comments.