…. Well, with Facebook anyway. I’ve written about many forms of Twitter storytelling, but Snipisode is the first storytelling app I’ve come across for Facebook. Snipisode, developed Agency Zen, lets you type or paste in a whole story and then with a click of a button snip up the story either by line or by punctuation — periods, question marks, or exclamation points. Then you choose a frequency for snips of the story to appear as status updates — daily or every two days.

The story then unfolds on your status line. Visitors can click the Full Story link by the status to see all your status posts for the story, including comments, on one page.

In an 8:41 video (below), inventor Dan Zen describes Snipisode and tells how to install and use the app. (I wish he sounded more enthusiastic.)

What personal, business, and creative applications can you think of for Snipisode? Maybe a new-product launch that tells the product’s story as a series of snips/status updates … A resume or bio broken into snips … A fictional story told episodically?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Today, the quote from Peggy Nelson that ended Sunday’s entry is our headline and the springboard for a look at some new ways of telling fictional and true stories with new media/social media/transmedia:

• Reader Stephanie Pride turned me on to a “‘micro-community’ of 17th century voices” that have clustered around the Twitter account @samuelpepys, the diarist Samuel Pepys (pictured). As reported here, “He kept a diary. Of everything. And what a diary it was — Pepys was a compulsive chronicler. EVERY DAY, for decades, he wrote something about what happened to him that day — from a few sentences to a couple of pages.” For this Twitter project:

  … they have taken the online archive of Samuel Pepys diaries, parsed them for a daily segment that best represents the activities of Mr. Pepys for that day in history, and converted it to be posted as a “Twitter Tweet” … Oddly enough there has been a growing micro-community of 17th century “voices” on Twitter that play off of Pepys’ Diaries– characters mentioned often in the main diary series (such as Mr. Pepys’ wife) now have their own accounts as well, and they appear to interact with each other from time to time.”


• Over on Facebook, the profile Henio Żytomirski tells the life story of a little Jewish boy, born in 1933 in Lublin, whose name was Henio Żytomirski (pictured).
• I have not been able to discover the name behind the blog StoryCentral DIGITAL, but she (he?) is a PhD student working on “a transmedia [romantic-comedy] fiction which will be the first rom com/chick lit transmedia story to be published in book form as well as on a host of digital platforms.
• I’ve covered several Twitter stories and novels in this space. As described here by Martin Bryant, Meet Mr Keihl is a novel that launched Nov. 22, 2009, and will take two years to complete at a rate of seven tweets per day. “The story is a spy epic set in the year 2130 that recounts the exploits of a legendary agent,” Bryant reports. Candyfloss and Pickles is another Twitter novel that Bryant cites. Bryant also references another type of Twitter storytelling, the fake Twitter account. Behind @dinner_guest is “an artist exploring the use of Twitter to let fictional characters tell their stories in a new way,” Bryant writes. The eight characters of the social-media Love Story November in Manchester each have their own Twitter feeds and blogs, Bryant notes. The story spanned November 2009.
• Also billed as a social-media love story is Crushing It, “a romantic comedy for the Twitter age. It’s a week long ‘live’ semi-improvised story told by the characters themselves using social networking.” The story unfolded between Feb. 1 and Feb. 5. The user was to decide how it all ends.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Much is being written these days about social-media storytelling. Here are five perspectives that have popped up on blogs recently:

1. Social media extends the ways you can tell your story. Social media is easier to execute and more effective when you or your organization are oriented toward storytelling to begin with. Roger Burks and Mercy Corps, for example, already focus on storytelling. Thus, Burks writes, “Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube an extension of what we were already doing and saying. For Mercy Corps, that meant storytelling … So we used Facebook and Twitter to syndicate the stories and other content we published on our website — particularly the Mercy Corps Blog, a new feature we launched last May. We used YouTube to publish videos that supported and extended that content. In nearly all cases, we linked back to our website. Social media became another place to tell our story, to engage readers and attract new supporters.” Burks notes that Mercy Corps extended both its audience and donations while telling the stories of the earthquake in Haiti, in part through social media.

2. Effective social-media storytelling engages audiences and inspires action.
In a piece that compares the relative storytelling success of various social-media campaigns, Dan Morrill notes:

The better the story the more people that will engage with the subject and the better your social media efforts will be. Social media people must be excellent story tellers that can engage and get an audience participate in the story so that it becomes theirs. The major issues with that are getting people to [take] action.

Morrill asserts that failed attempts at social media — abandoned blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook profiles, for instance — result when the story behind these efforts fails to engage audiences. I’m sure that’s often the case. It was for a client of mine who recently put his blog on hiatus. But I would suggest that a bigger reason for abandoning social media is simply that people are busy and overwhelmed, and maintaining these venues becomes tiresome. Most social media requires at least some commitment to writing, and I’ve found that the writing obligation fills many people with enormous angst.
3. Social-media harnesses stories your audience is already telling. “Your fans are already out there in the world, sharing their stories every day, without any prompting from you,” writes Jesse Stanchak. Social campaigns simply put that drive to work.” Stanchak offers three guidelines for making the most of the stories audiences are already telling: 1) Catch them at the moment of excitement; 2) If your fans don’t have a soapbox, build one; and 3) Be ready to respond.
4. Social media is an example of “quantum narrative.” So says Mike Bonifer, who in his piece, Quantum Narrative, suggests a dichotomy comparing “Newtonian Narrative” with Quantum Narrative. Quintessentially postmodern, quantum narrative “redefines storytelling by ripping up and recomposing the stuff stories have been made of since the first cave dweller showed her companions how to build a fire (and got thrown out of the cave not long after by another cave dweller who claimed the secret of fire for himself). … It has no beginning, middle or end. It has unlimited numbers of beginnings, middles and ends. It is generative instead of repetitive. It is participatory instead of authored. There’s no traditional storyteller-audience relationship; in the Quantum Narrative, everyone is responsible for creating the story. It does not foster consumption as much as it invites customization,” Bonifer writes (and I encourage you to read the rest of his fascinating characterization). In addition to social media as an example of quantum narrative, Bonifer sees glimmers of the phenomenon in

   transmedia, massive multiplayer games, distributed production models, theme parks … alternate reality games, activist brands, smart badges, business in China, remixes and mashups, augmented reality, micro-loans and the video of your dance in the musical, Hair.

   By the way, I’ve previously cited this “quantum” characterization — in an entry on a piece by Frank Mills about “quantum storytelling.”
5. Social Media provides a way to construct stories from the information-flow firehose. Peggy Nelson’s work would seem to epitomize the quantum narrative that Bonifer writes about. In a Q&A with Nelson by Andrea Pitzer, Nelson describes her work as “new media art with a focus on decentralized, episodic storytelling,” as well as “experimental storytelling” — storytelling for a world in which “people are so fractured and they only have 15 seconds to look at something anyway” and “every Twitter account is a character, every Twitter account is a performance.” (Check out Nelson’s Twitter projects, @AdeleHugo, and @enoch_soames.) In that world, we need a filter so we can drink from the firehose of information coming at us. “We still need someone to construct the stories out of all the information coming in,” Nelson says. New media, of which I’m guessing social media is a subset, may provide the way to construct these stories.

I close with Nelson’s inspiring words: “[T]here are so many just-barely explored opportunities to tell interesting stories in new ways.”

[Thanks to Thaler Pekar and Madelyn Blair for alerting me to some of these perspectives. Image credit: Erika Hargreaves.]

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

First: Internship Story Has Happy Ending

My recent involvement with Ink Foundry’s contest to choose a social-media intern based 3-minute videos submitted by candidates reinforced the value of story-rich social media in the job search. Readers might want to know how the contest came out. The candidate whom I felt created the video of highest (and most storied) quality, Lauren, got the fewest votes in the contest. Her competitor, Rachel, was clearly skilled at rallying votes and won in the voting. Rachel deserves a lot of credit for harnessing social media to win the contest. I learned yesterday that Ink Foundry hired both Rachel and Lauren. An outsider like me could conclude that the agency’s decision recognizes that in social media, quality content is just as important as the ability to reach great numbers of people.

Next: Two bloggers Offer Guidelines for Storied Social-Media Campaigns

A couple of bloggers have recently posted entries that also cite the importance of story-rich, quality content. Park Howell, who runs an eponymous green marketing agency, proposes a social-media-campaign “recipe” that is “7 parts strategy, 6 parts storytelling, and 4 parts tactical channels.” Job-seekers, in my opinion, can apply most of this recipe to deploying social media in the job search, Here’s my version of his recipe, adapted for individuals mounting a social-media campaign to bolster a job search:

I. Strategy for Job-Search Social Media

1. Describe your brand in one sentence

2. Communications goal

• What are you trying to accomplish? [Probably something like: “Communicate my unique value to employers.”]

3. Where is your audience relative to what you have to offer as an employee?

• Awareness: How familiar are they with you and your qualifications?

Interest: They’ve heard of you but have not interacted with you.

Action: They’ve taken at least one action because of your campaign — perhaps contacted you or invited you for an interview

Advocacy: Howell says advocates are fans of your brand and perhaps even evangelists. In the realm of job search, this level of awareness probably comes only when the audience/employer hires the job-seeker

4. How does your audience use social media?

• Although Howell’s question is appropriate for job-seekers, his characterization of how audiences use social media (which comes from Forrester Research’s Technographic Ladder) is probably not quite on target. Audiences, Howell says, are Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. I would characterize the employer audience as Seekers when it comes to hiring; employers are routinely searching LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter as a low-cost way to find candidates.

5. What makes your story unique and shareable?

6. How will you become more approachable?

7. How will you know you have won? [presumably when you receive a job offer]

II. Telling Better Accomplishments Stories

Accomplishment stories are the meat and potatoes of getting an employer’s attention. Employer want to know that you can achieve the same results for them that you have attained for past employers. Howell’s story formula needs a bit of tweaking for accomplishments. Here’s my version:

1. Describe the hero (you, the job-seeker/protagonist)

2. Describe a situation, challenge, or problem you faced.

3. Who/what stood in your way (Antagonists, Obstacles)?

4. What did you have to overcome?

5. What was the result; what did you achieve?

Howell provides a library of resources to help you become a better storyteller.

III. Activating Your Career-Marketing Social Media Plan

1. Realistically, what do you have to do to activate your plan?

2. Who needs to buy in and champion your cause? [employers and network contacts who can refer you to employers]

3. How long will it take to launch?

4. What social media channels will you launch first? [such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, your own blog]

Meanwhile, Rick Braddy makes a strong case for using stories when launching anything to an audience. His examples of “anything” include products, companies, websites, or political candidates), so a launch can clearly apply to a job-seeker. “These stories,” Braddy writes, “answer important questions for the audience,” which I’ve again slightly tweaked to apply to a job-seeker launching himself or herself to an audience of employers:

• Who is this candidate and where did he or she come from?
• Why should my organization care?
• What’s in it for my organization? What can this person contribute
• Why should I listen to you, the candidate?
• Why should I take action and actually interview you or consider hiring you?
• Why should I act now instead of delaying or just doing nothing instead?

Continues Braddy:

Stories provide an interesting way to answer these (and other) questions people have about what’s being launched and how it could affect them. Stories can be conveyed in a variety of ways, including blogging, videos, newsletters, and emails.

These are all some great starting points for ensuring that both story-rich content and strategy for reaching audiences are optimal for the job search.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It’s been at least two months since I’ve looked at storytelling items that are getting significant buzz on Twitter — usually in the form of multiple retweets. The primary application I use to alert me to storytelling items on Twitter has been out of commission, and my alternate methods aren’t quite as user-friendly. So, the following isn’t a comprehensive compilation — nor is it totally up to date — but I present some highlights of the storytelling conversation on Twitter:

• Henry Jenkins, leading expert on transmedia storytelling (and, I believe originator of the term), enjoyed many, many retweets of his Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling.

• Rob Mills got tons of comments and retweets of his December blog entry, Storytelling on the Web, which suggests that storytelling has gotten lost in cyberspace.
• Through Twitter I learned of a 50+-page downloadable PDF Literature Review by Patricia McGee, PhD., on using storytelling for teaching and learning.
• My good friend Thomas Clifford had a popular blog entry in his Boosting Employee Engagement With Multimedia Storytelling, and interview with Jim Hauden, author of The Art of Engagement: Bridging the Gap Between People and Possibilities. Here’s what Hauden has to say about storytelling:

  A number of companies are starting to see the difference between using multi-media to “tell and sell” and using it to create insight and to model examples of success. One company calls their examples “proof points” of what behavior looks like when it is in concert with a new strategy. Multi-media can be a powerful way to answer one of the most profound questions that people rarely ask regarding strategy: “What does it look like?” As long as people are concerned that what they think it should look like might be different from what leaders are picturing, they’ll sit back and wait for others to go first. But if leaders can vividly create insight through multi-media in terms of what it looks like when strategy is being executed, we can start to close that gap. We begin to reduce the apprehension that people feel when it comes to taking the risk to bring new strategies to life.

• Three Reasons Why Storytelling is the Key to Social Media Marketing Success by “Guarav” was a popular post that included these words:

  Given how central storytelling is to the human condition, it’s not a surprise that social media is most powerful when it is used for storytelling. These stories can be about the organization and its brands, but they are more powerful when they are stories about the role these brands play in the lives of their consumers. The most powerful stories are about what these brands stand for, if they stand for a larger social object: a lifestyle, a cause, or a passion.

  The resources at the end of the post are especially valuable.
• And two quotes I liked from the last couple of months: @jshelley78 (who subsequently changed his Twitter account to @jamesshelley) said: “What ‘actually happened’ does not define us nearly as much as the story we choose to believe” and (I believe) from my friend @treypennington: “Look for strong linkages [among] #socialmedia, #knowldgemgmt & #storytelling to emerge in 2010.”

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Two notable back-to-back story events coming up:

Jill Golick is organizing a Social Media Week Story Project, Social Media Week being Feb. 1-5. Golick wants to “use the social media to tell some stories about how social media are affecting relationships” and is recruiting writers, actors, designers and other interested collaborators to “put together a story room … to turn … data into story arcs.” Then, Golick wants to “have each writer create a character on the web using social media tools like blogs, social bookmarking, FriendFeed and Twitter. They can cast actors to ‘play’ their character in profile pictures, photo albums and other media they may develop.”

“During Social Media Week,” Golick says, participants can “play out the stories of our characters through their social networking activities.” She invites interested folks to e-mail her.

Then, on Feb. 6, Noa Baum (pictured), whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the 2009 Golden Fleece Conference last April, is holding an all-day seminar called “Your Life’s Story and the Legacy You Leave” under the auspices of the Smithsonian Resident Associate Program.

Some snippets from the seminar description:

Noa Baum shows how to shape memories into a personal narrative and how to reveal underlying universal themes.

The morning session provides an introduction to the oral tradition of storytelling as the oldest tool for transmitting wisdom and values from one generation to the next. After lunch, participants learn techniques for deepening and expanding the images within their stories, exploring the connections between personal narratives and universal archetypes. They also explore the role of the listener in shaping a story and learn how to interact with their listeners to gain insight into how stories become legacies.

Go here to reserve a spot in the seminar, which is held in Washington DC, at the S. Dillon Ripley Center of the Smithsonian.

Thanks to Thaler Pekar for alerting me to this one.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It’s been almost two months since my last roundup of storytelling tweets that enjoyed significant buzz in the Twitterverse. Time to look at what folks think is worth re-tweeting in the storytelling world:

• The book Why Now Is the Time Crush It! Cash in on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk has its own hashtag, #crushit, on Twitter, and one tweeter said his/her favorite line from the book is: “Storytelling is by far the most underrated skill in business.”
• Another quote I like, which comes from @jonbuscall via @rbrtstar: “All media is storytelling media — web 2.0 makes stories independent of space and time.”
• Much talked about on Twitter in the last month or so has been Michael Margolis’s terrific book, Believe Me:

“Does your Innovation have a story?” by Jeffrey Phillips

Guy Kawasaki’s recommendation of Michelle James’s interview with Michael, “The importance of storytelling in creative leadership: An interview with Michael Margolis.”

• An article in the Los Angeles Times, “‘Transmedia’: A brave new world in entertainment marketing,” about transmedia guru Henry Jenkins teaching this topic at the University of Southern California, proved buzzworthy.
• Much talked about was Beth Kanter’s article Multi-Channel Fundraising Campaigns: Storytelling Is Key, which in turn cited the blog entry “What Story Are You Telling Your Donors, Where Are You Telling It?” by Thomas Negron. Negron reported on presentations at the NYC chapter of NTEN’s 501 Tech Club that included Rebecca Willett of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Kanter includes Willett’s slide deck in her post. “The point of [Negron’s] post is that good storytelling is the heart and soul of donor solicitations,” Kanter writes, “and a consistent story must be told across all donor touch points.” She quotes Negron: “This presents a wonderful opportunity because every time a donor interacts with your organization it is a chance to share another aspect of your story and reiterate the work they make possible.”
• A tweeter suggested that a Google Search can tell a story, as in this video, “Parisian Love”.
• In the great PowerPoint vs. storied presentations discussion, Prezi and Ahead were cited in the Twitterverse as two good alternatives to PowerPoint because they “make you think about concepts, not serial slides.

• Finally, and not necessarily buzzworthy, I came across a Web application, TweetCloud that creates a cloud of the words one tweets the most over a given period. At left is @AStoriedCareer’s tweet cloud for the last year. No surprises on the big words; perhaps a few surprises on the smaller ones.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Ben Macintyre’s Times of London article from two weeks ago, The internet is killing storytelling continues to generate huge buzz on Twitter, and I expected to vehemently disagree with it. But I surprised myself by acknowledging that Macintyre has a few good points.

First, I like the staccato spew of his opening salvo:

Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

I also admit that the Internet has diminished my attention span. I find it harder and harder to summon the patience to read longer newspaper and magazine stories these days — like Nicholas Carr’s experience that Macintryre describes:

[Atlantic Monthly essayist Nicholas Carr] admitted that he can no longer immerse himself in substantial books and longer articles in the way he once did. “What the net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swift-moving stream of particles.”

Thus, I can’t completely disagree with Macintyre’s claim: “If the culprit is obvious, so is the primary victim of this radically reduced attention span: the narrative, the long-form story, the tale. … Very few stories of more than 1,000 words achieve viral status on the internet.” This last statement is probably true, though Macintyre offers no evidence. (Stephanie West Allen cited this blog entry in which David DiSalvo points out the lack of any citations that support Macintyre’s assertions.)

But here’s where we start to part ways. Macintryre writes: “The blog is a soap box, not a story. Facebook is a place for tell-tales perhaps, but not for telling tales.” Sure, that’s true of some blogs — but many others are wonderful venues for storytelling, providing a storied outlet for both writers and readers that didn’t exist 15 years ago. And while storytelling on Facebook may be flawed, millions more people are telling and reading stories than did before the age of social media.

I disagree with Macintyre’s assertion that Internet storytelling is not nourishing us. The vast variety of ways the Internet has opened up for people to tell stories has led not to an anorexic culture but one confronting a Thanksgiving feast of story possibilities:

The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. The consequence is an anorexic form of culture.

I certainly agree with these assertions by Macintyre — except for the “paradoxically” part. Since we do hunger in unprecedented ways for stories, it is not at all paradoxical that the Internet has provided vast, unprecedented, and varied tools and venues for storytelling:

Paradoxically, there has never been a greater hunger for narrative, for stories that give shape and meaning to experience. .. Our fascination with other people’s stories is as great, if not greater, than any time in history.

In a blog entry, Dan Conover, Joel Achenbach and Deborah Potter on storytelling, responding to a different piece written before Macintyre’s piece ever appeared, Deborah Potter wrote:

… is Twitter a threat to storytelling? Of course not. And not just for the obvious reason that Twitter is an entirely different medium from long-form narrative. It’s never going to replace good writing. Checking a Twitter stream is an entirely different experience from curling up with a good book, and most serious readers — even those who are also avid tweeters — wouldn’t trade one for the other. But here the real reason Twitter isn’t a threat to storytelling: Twitter can make writing better.

So, two more points to counter Macintyre’s argument: There’s still plenty of room for long-form narrative in people’s lives, and sometimes less is more. Where is it written that stories must be long to be good?

Jean Marie Tenlen responded to Macintyre’s essay with a blog entry carrying examples “to illuminate the multiple layers of narrative that the Internet enables.”

Macintyre’s piece also sparked discussion on Golden Fleece’s Working Stories discussion list. A few excerpts:

I don’t agree. That’s like saying sex is killing love.

— Seth Kahan, president, Performance Development Group, Inc.

A similar perspective as this article was posited by a well known neuroscientist (who I remember had a grand title but I don’t remember her name) from the UK who said that gaming was killing social capabilities. It was a TV report and I laughed to myself when they cut to four young guys in an in-depth conversation about how to best make progress in one of the latest video games. Seemed like there was plenty of socialising happen and the game was the trigger.

— Shawn Callahan, Anecdote

… my teenage kids are just as likely to read Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc as they are to spend time on Facebook and IM’ing. In fact, they spend hours IM’ing, which seems to me to be the modern equivalent of hours on the phone. They spend just as much time gossiping (telling each other stories) as I did as a teenager. They watch movies, and as I said, they also read books. Long books with intricate plots that carry through the series. They don’t like reading most of the texts they are given to read for school. So what exactly is different? … WIth email, I write more than I did before email. I send friends interesting stuff about our travels, before it was what would fit on a postcard. So technology has helped me write more stories, well, personal stories. If we are talking about literature, well no, technology hasn’t added to me reading anymore than I did before the internet came along. But then it hasn’t reduced it either. I read when I am interested, I stop reading when I lose interest. I don’t think my level of interest, or attention span has changed as a result.

— Melanie White

What forms and venues for storytelling — as well as levels of storytelling participation — were unimaginable before the Internet?

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Do you know the story of rabbit, rabbit day? Neither does anyone else according to Wikipedia, yet millions say some variation of “rabbit, rabbit” on the first day of every month. I never knew about this tradition until I married my husband, in whose family of origin the habit is well-entrenched. Here’s what Wikipedia says about “rabbit, rabbit day:”

“Rabbit rabbit white rabbit” is a common superstition. The most common modern version states that a person should say “rabbit, rabbit, white rabbit” or simply “rabbit, rabbit” upon waking on the first day of each new month, and on doing so will receive good luck for the duration of that month. … The exact origin of the superstition is unknown, though it has appeared in print at least as early as 1954 in Bromley, Kent, where it is most commonly said to have originated, though some reports place its origins even earlier, into the 1800s. Today it has spread to most of the English-speaking countries of the world, although like all folklore, determining its exact area of distribution is difficult. This superstition is related to the broader belief in the rabbit or hare being a “lucky” animal, as exhibited in the practice of carrying a rabbit’s foot for luck. Some have also believed it is representing a jumping into the future and moving ahead with life and happiness.

A friend of one of my Facebook friends told this story today:

I had a 4th grade teacher that would march us into her teacher friend’s classroom on the first day of every month to jump up and down and shout “rabbit day!” three times, and then turn and march out.

Anyhoo … it’s a good day to report on which items related to storytelling have attained the most buzz on Twitter since my last report about six weeks ago:

• I wrote about Waterlife before in connection with “database storytelling” (which is still a mystery); this presentation got lots of buzz on Twitter.
• A video that previews a Nov. 19 conference in London called Creativity and Technology is titled CaT Video: The Storytelling Throwdown: Is technology changing brand storytelling? and was much-retweeted. [Disclaimer: Because it’s more than 20 minutes long, I haven’t yet had the chance to watch it.]
• Much buzz focused on Adam Westbrook’s blog post on 6×6 storytelling for freelance journalists, the third in a series of six blog posts, each with six tips for the next generation of freelance multimedia journalists, in which Westbrook wrote:

  A lot of the focus for multimedia journalists and digital journalists has been on new technology: using Twitter, learning Flash. But there’s a danger that in the rush to learn new skills, we forgot (or never learn) the oldest ones. And there is no skill older, or more important, than storytelling.

• Every month in the Twitterverse, it seems at least one movie is cited for excellent storytelling. Since my last compilation, three films have enjoyed storytelling accolades — two with “9” in the title, 9 and District 9, along with Inglorious Basterds. One movie, Extract, was cited for weak storytelling.

• Following the death of Ted Kennedy, The Boston Globe’s tribute was cited as a great example of multimedia storytelling.
• This same kind of storytelling — for magazines — attained much traction based on the article, Magazines Need to Embrace Multimedia Storytelling in Digital Age, an interview by Mark Glaser on Mediashift with Jim Gaines of Flyp Media, “an online publisher of magazine-style content that combines video, audio, Flash animations and interactive features.”

• A new collaborative storytelling tool, Storybird, got lots of buzz. The tool targets narrative artists, families, writers, and educators. “Storybirds are short, visual stories that you make with family and friends to share.”
• I helped promote Cathie Dodds’ Labor Day Twitterthon, designed to “see if it was possible to tell your story with Twitter,” and the results were significantly retweeted.
• I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about transmedia storytelling recently, in part because this story form has garnered so much attention, such as in the article, The revolutionary power of transmedia storytelling.
• And finally, my friend Tom Clifford enjoyed well-deserved retweets of his Three Keys to Good Storytelling, a guest post from Bluedot Productions, the filmmakers behind the documentary, The Quantum Activist.

Make it a good Rabbit Rabbit day!

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.