The Storytelling 2.0 Post That Never Was

At least a year and a half ago, I planned a post entitled “Proposition: Storytelling 2.0 is the Holy Grail of Online Content.” The post was inspired by the seminal, attention-getting, oft-cited piece by Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine, “Web 2.0 Storytelling: The Emergence of a New Genre” (which came out in the Nov-Dec 2008 issue of EDUCAUSE Review). That was a damned important piece, and no self-respecting curator of material about applied storytelling should have let it go by without notice or comment. I still have, somewhere in my milk crate of possible blog material, a thick sheaf of material for my planned post, held together with a binder clip.

But I never wrote the post. I kept scheduling it, probably beginning with its late 2008 publication date, and pushing it back. The most recent date for which I had scheduled it was Dec. 31, 2009. The post just kept growing in my brain; I kept collecting more and more relevant material; and I just never felt I could do justice to Alexander’s and Levine’s brilliant piece.

A recent post by writer and instructional designer Dianne Rees reminded my of my long-neglected response. The moment has likely long passed for the post I originally planned, but it’s worth noting that Web 2.0 storytelling, or as I prefer to call it, Storytelling 2.0, is alive and well.

Rees designed a brief, attractive slideshow describing several salient points about Storytelling 2.0:

Rees also lists 14 examples of Storytelling 2.0, of which I’ve blogged about or listed lonelygirl15, twistori, Tell a story in 5 frames, Cathy’s Book, and We feel fine.

Rees’s listings that were new to me:

Another one, recently gaining significant buzz, though not on Rees’s list is Welcome to Pine Point, described by Kottke.org as, “a lovely interactive remembrance of a Canadian mining town that doesn’t exist anymore.” A blog post by “Katherine” on NPR’s ScienceFriday.com calls the project “an interactive documentary. A virtual scrapbook. A ‘liquid book,’ noting that Welcome to Pine Point is “hard to define, because I’ve never seen anything like it before. But it’s most certainly a beautiful project that, to me, signals a new era in storytelling.” She continues:

The format is an interactive webpage, full of photos, interviews, videos, animations, music, and text. The story is a meditation on memory, and the medium itself seems to mimic how we experience memory — through sometimes random, often powerful fragments.

Katherine also cites a piece on Neiman Storyboard that gives the backstory of the Pine Point project.