Came across a couple of unusual and creative ways to look at storytelling and tell stories:

On Inner Ear Ltd., Dougal Perman suggests storytelling with playlists. Noting that playlisting is “an interactive, nonlinear approach to storytelling,” Perman cites “great potential to explore this style of storytelling further using social media services and playlists.” He gives the following “example plan for telling a story with crowd sourced content:”

• Choose a theme for a playlist
• Announce the theme via your blog, Facebook page and Twitter
• Invite people to add tunes (or videos, photos or other media) to a collaborative Spotify playlist
• Hold discussions on your blog or Facebook page about the best way to order the items
• Share the playlist and promote it as a story
• Inspire others to do the same, or create complimentary artwork to accompany it

I would like to learn more about the “promote it as a story” item. What’s the best way to do that?

The other approach I observed also allows for nonlinear storytelling. Trailmeme, which bills itself as “a way to tell stories with Web content,” reminds me a lot of the more buzz-generating Storify, the tagline of which is “create stories using social media.”

A “trail,” according Trailmeme “is a (partially) sequenced collection of digital objects, such as webpages. A trail can be a straight sequence of pages or contain branches and other interesting features that allow you to construct more complex patterns and stories, such as organizing a tutorial into two branches for ‘beginner’ and ‘advanced’ material.”

Mouseover the little camera icon at left to see a sample nonlinear “trailmap.” You can also see a video about Trailmeme below. Seems to me that the Trailmeme site emphasized storytelling more the first time I visited than it does now; the “story” concept seems more toned down.