I haven’t done one of these compilations of the storytelling topics that people are talking about on Twitter for a few weeks because I’ve been traveling across the country in an RV with limited Internet access. Now, I’m one place — our summer home in Kettle Falls, WA, till sometime in October.

This compilation doesn’t represent the absolute latest in Twitter storytelling buzz, but it’s somewhat recent — the last month or so:

• This one actually is from the last week, though I first saw it sometime last year. Probably the most re-tweeted comment about Philip Toledano’s poignant photo essay Days with my Father, was “For those who think the web isn’t yet capable of emotional storytelling.”

• Tweeters praised a piece on narrative, brevity, and storytelling by Jessica Helfand on the blog Design Observer in which she said: “the pithy, out-of-context statement is becoming its own narrative form” and asked: “Is there some human need to experience stories with beginnings, middles and ends?”
• Generating some 33 comments was a piece on role of storytelling (real narrative) in new media at BBH Labs. The author, Mel Exon, talks about “the wholesale reinvention of a (sometimes much maligned) skill, the art of storytelling” and responds to someone else’s “observation that ‘there’s currently much less of a culture of developing narrative or storytelling on the web.’” Exon’s own observation is that “we are now in the business of starting stories, not attempting to nail them down from beginning to end. Letting stories take on a life of their own, to be played with, passed around, modified and enriched by the audiences they’re developed for.”
• Not in the least surprising was the amount of buzz for the blog entry on Psychology Today, How storytelling can make sex better, but I couldn’t find much about storytelling in the piece.
• Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media got significant attention for her entry, Transmedia Storytelling and Co-Creation Networks, which includes a very cool diagram by Gary Hayes. Kanter talks about the application of transmedia storytelling to nonprofits, offering this definition of transmedia storytelling from Henry Jenkins via Lina Srivastava:

  Transmedia storytelling is storytelling by a number of decentralized authors who share and create content for distribution across multiple forms of media. Transmedia immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story.

• No link for this one, and I also failed to note who tweeted it, but it’s a quote I found interesting: “Social media is not about technology. It’s about STAR: Storytelling, Transparency, Accountability, and Relationships.”
• And another very cool and highly re-tweeted quote — from my good friend Terrence Gargiulo — is: “The shortest distance between two people is a story.”
• Robert Nagle got some buzz for his post on Idiot Programmer, Blogging is a Careless Activity; Storytelling is Not, in which he announced that he “decided to commit to using this blog as an outlet for more creative forms like storytelling. Not fiction per se, but informal storytelling.”
• Jacques Arsenault got re-tweeted for the blog entry Mapping the Seven Deadly Sins, about a project in which “geography researchers at Kansas State University have used publicly available statistics to map the Seven Deadly Sins in the United States” as “an example of the storytelling power of visualization” You can read more about the project and see more images here. Fascinating visualizations, yes. Storytelling? I’m not so sure.
• Garnering buzz was news that A Storied Career mainstay SMITH magazine has launched SMITHTeens and will publish Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous & Obscure.
• As possible proof that I’m ahead of the curve, A Million Monkeys Typing enjoyed significant recent buzz, especially as related to a blog entry, A Million Monkeys Typing: Collaborative storytelling; I blogged about the site back on Feb. 26