Opportunities for folks to tell their stories on the Internet appear endless. I discover new ones at least weekly. Here are a few recent finds, most of which also appear on my sidebar (descriptions are in the words of the originators):
VUVOX is an easy to use production and instant sharing service that allows you to mix, create and blend your personal media — video, photos and music into rich personal expressions. VUVOX reflects your life. … We want to help you amplify your own visual voice. … VUVOX gives you the power to create one-of-a-kind stories in an instant. All you need to do is provide whatever cool content that you have. Take pictures, video, audio and text. Mix it up. Choose backgrounds, colors, textures that create your vibe and then you are ready to share your piece with the world. … We are passionate people who crave creative expression and value storytelling as an essential part of every day life. We are committed to making the whole world a better place by enabling you to tell the stories that need to be told… just because they are yours to tell. … VUVOX founders have created this foundation with your story in mind.
MemoryMiner is a new application developed by GroupSmarts… MemoryMiner represents the first step toward a long-term goal: the creation of the world’s most extensive network of first-person accounts of modern society and culture. … Everyone has a story. We at GroupSmarts are committed to bringing those unheard, and unseen, stories to life with MemoryMiner. Many of the most interesting records of modern society and culture exist in analog form, “trapped” in boxes of old photos, letters and the like. … we hope that MemoryMiner will be widely used to bring these materials, and more importantly, the stories that can be told from them, into the networked, digital world. Similarly, just as old photographs and documents contain the seeds of fascinating untold stories, so too do many of the millions of digital photographs that are taken every day. So many people are experiencing and doing interesting and even amazing things with their lives, yet their stories remain untold … While there are plenty of tools for “managing” digital media, there is a real need to link media in meaningful ways, using an easy to grasp “People, Places and Times” structure. We hope that MemoryMiner will expedite that process and contribute to bringing the experience of digital storytelling and publishing to all.
Storychasers is a multi-state (and potentially multi-national) educational collaborative empowering students and teachers to responsibly record and share stories of local, regional and global interest as citizen journalists.
Where STN (Student Television Network) participants may focus more narrowly on student broadcast news productions, Storychasers has a broader focus on not only student-created news broadcasts, but also student-created documentary films and live event coverage (webcasting). Storychaser media productions can be shared as live broadcast events or recorded, asynchronously shared audio and video files.
OK, the origins of this next one fascinated me. The founders of the storytlr initiative say they were inspired by a video from Loic Lemeur who asked about a way to help him build “the centralized me.” As he explains in the video below (and also in this blog entry, which also shows a picture of Lemeur’s social map), he drew considerable attention by creating a social map of his online existence — all the venues he visits in the course of a typical day online to get his news, see what his friends are up to, and share his own life. But Lemeur longs for a centralized place where he can get all his social media at once (and he mentions services, such as FriendFeed, that are getting close to what he desires). The venue Lemeur craves reminds me a bit of my Social Media Resume, which does not yet really function the way Lemeur imagines, but has the potential (in my opinion). The folks at storytlr believe they’ve created such a venue. “Storytlr brings you just that, a platform to build the centralized you…,” they write. Then, they noticed the narrative quality of their platform:
Finally we realized that our flow of [social media self-expression was] in fact telling a story, the story of our daily lives, and that sometimes we wanted to repackage this story in a nice format (beyond a photo album) to share it with friends. So we decided to make it really easy to mashup all these activities into a compelling story that is easy to share.
I think storytlr is a fairly cool tool, as illustrated by the featured story on the site (and I created a kind of storyboarded timeline of my Twitter tweets using storytlr — but I’m not sure the platform does what Lemeur hopes for.
Fittingly, the founders of my next find, Great Life Stories, explain their existence with a story:
Each of our founders had close relatives have near-death experiences or pass away in a … 2-3 month window of time. As a consequence of these events, occurring so close together…, we realized that time was short and that our parents and grandparents were transitioning into the last phase of their lives. … It was imperative that we begin the process of saving our parent’s accomplishments, our childhoods, and our family histories. We all agreed that there was much that we could do to capture our parents’ stories and experience so we could share them with our children, grandchildren, and future generations. … we expected that many of our ancestors shared common experiences around major worldwide events: The Great Depression, WW II, the Korean and Vietnam wars. What we discovered was that not only did people go through similar experiences around wars or economic events, they also shared common family experiences: a first date, a first job, a first child. … These common themes gave us an opportunity to share these similarities [among] different story tellers. One person’s life was linked to others through their experience in unexpected ways. Once these common experiences were connected, storytellers could enjoy reading each other’s stories and the community was born.
Finally, Winamop, the lowest tech of these discoveries. Winamop’s focus seems to be largely on writing, and it covers Poetry, Comedy, News, Art, Shakespeare, Music, and of course, Stories. I glanced at a few of the stories in the Stories section, and I can’t quite tell if these are fiction/creative-writing type stories or people’s real stories, or a combination. No matter to a story fan. Winamop’s founder writes:
Winamop was conceived on a whim, is run on a shoestring, ignored by the many, loved by the few and has continued unabashed since 2003.
What I really want to know is where the heck the name Winamop came from. Here’s the explanation:
I was going to Winamp’s web-site and my fat finger must have caught the “O” key as I went for the “P”. I got Winamop.com, or rather I didn’t, because it didn’t exist! It made me laugh to see the pathetic lament from IE that it “couldn’t find winamop.com” and I went and registered it.
provide whatever cool content that you have. Take pictures, video, audio and text. Mix it up. Choose backgrounds, colors, textures that create your vibe and then you are ready to share your piece with the world. … We are passionate people who crave creative expression and value storytelling as an essential part of every day life. We are committed to making the whole world a better place by enabling you to tell the stories that need to be told… just because they are yours to tell. … VUVOX founders have created this foundation with your story in mind.
MemoryMiner is a new application developed by GroupSmarts… MemoryMiner represents the first step toward a long-term goal: the creation of the world’s most extensive network of first-person accounts of modern society and culture. … Everyone has a story. We at GroupSmarts are committed to bringing those unheard, and unseen, stories to life with MemoryMiner. Many of the most interesting records of modern society and culture exist in analog form, “trapped” in boxes of old photos, letters and the like. … we hope that MemoryMiner will be widely used to bring these materials, and more importantly, the stories that can be told from them, into the networked, digital world. Similarly, just as old photographs and documents contain the seeds of fascinating untold stories, so too do many of the millions of digital photographs that are taken every day. So many people are experiencing and doing interesting and even amazing things with their lives, yet their stories remain untold … While there are plenty of tools for “managing” digital media, there is a real need to link media in meaningful ways, using an easy to grasp “People, Places and Times” structure. We hope that MemoryMiner will expedite that process and contribute to bringing the experience of digital storytelling and publishing to all.
collaborative empowering students and teachers to responsibly record and share stories of local, regional and global interest as citizen journalists.
As he explains in the video below (and also in this blog entry, which also shows a picture of Lemeur’s social map), he drew considerable attention by creating a social map of his online existence — all the venues he visits in the course of a typical day online to get his news, see what his friends are up to, and share his own life. But Lemeur longs for a centralized place where he can get all his social media at once (and he mentions services, such as FriendFeed, that are getting close to what he desires). The venue Lemeur craves reminds me a bit of my Social Media Resume, which does not yet really function the way Lemeur imagines, but has the potential (in my opinion). The folks at storytlr believe they’ve created such a venue. “Storytlr brings you just that, a platform to build the centralized you…,” they write. Then, they noticed the narrative quality of their platform:pass away in a … 2-3 month window of time. As a consequence of these events, occurring so close together…, we realized that time was short and that our parents and grandparents were transitioning into the last phase of their lives. … It was imperative that we begin the process of saving our parent’s accomplishments, our childhoods, and our family histories. We all agreed that there was much that we could do to capture our parents’ stories and experience so we could share them with our children, grandchildren, and future generations. … we expected that many of our ancestors shared common experiences around major worldwide events: The Great Depression, WW II, the Korean and Vietnam wars. What we discovered was that not only did people go through similar experiences around wars or economic events, they also shared common family experiences: a first date, a first job, a first child. … These common themes gave us an opportunity to share these similarities [among] different story tellers. One person’s life was linked to others through their experience in unexpected ways. Once these common experiences were connected, storytellers could enjoy reading each other’s stories and the community was born.
Winamop was conceived on a whim, is run on a shoestring, ignored by the many, loved by the few and has continued unabashed since 2003.