This Is More Like the Holy Grail: Top 10 User-Generated Storytelling Blogs

On blogs.com, Larry Smith of SMITH Magazine published a Guest Top Ten List —Top 10 User-Generated Storytelling Blogs.

In an entry the other day, I ruminated on the question of “What is the Holy Grail of Online Content?” I posited a few ideas suggested by a group of bloggers writing about similar topics around the same time.

Certainly one possibility is “Transmedia Storytelling” (stories being told across platforms) of which an “old” blog friend, Christy Dena said in her comment on the entry: “It is just in the last couple of years that more people have discovered this practice, and to all the newcomers it is now known as ‘transmedia storytelling.” Dena is rightly amused because she has been writing about “Polymorphic Narrative” and “Cross Media Storytelling” since at least 2005.

I’m asserting that user-generated storytelling blogs comprise another nominee for the Holy Grail of online content. What amazes me the most about Smith’s list is that I had not previously heard of any of these storytelling blogs, though I know of many other user-generated storytelling blogs and sites.

Here’s the list — with “About” descriptions of each blog:

1. Cassette From My Ex: They were into you, so they made you a tape. Today you don’t have a cassette player, but you still can’t toss that mix. We share the stories and the soundtrack to your earliest loves.
2. FOUND Magazine: We collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles – anything that gives a glimpse into someone
  else’s life. Anything goes…

For Those Who Tried To Rock: For Those Who Tried To Rock… We Salute You … A Where Are They Now? for those who never were, then. This is a sonic history of the American pop band. Our goal is to capture data about every band to have been formed by teens with that perfect mixture of big dreams and questionable talent in suburban garages, high school music rooms, and college dorms across America. And to preserve them cryogenically with the very dry ice they once merited, for future generations. … Send us your story…

1. Mortified: Hailed a “cultural phenomenon” by Newsweek and celebrated for years by the likes of This American Life, The Today Show, Esquire, The Onion AV Club, Daily Candy, Entertainment Weekly, and E!, Mortified is a comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids. Witness adults sharing their own adolescent journals, letters, poems, lyrics, home movies, stories and more. After all, where else can you hear grown men and women confront their past with firsthand tales of their… first kiss, first puff, worst prom, fights with mom, life at bible camp, worst hand job, best mall job, and reasons they deserved to marry Jon Bon Jovi?
2. Own Your Failure: Barack Obama is right: the Republicans should own the failure of the last 8 years… but we all know the chances of that happening are slim! That leaves a lot of failure left to be claimed. Who wants it?

- PostSecret: an ongoing community art project where people
  mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.

- The Postcard Project: … the online extension of the forthcoming, limited-edition, letterpress release, Correspondences. The featured story of The Postcard Project, … “What He’s Poised to Do” … requires your participation to be brought fully to life.

- To-Do List: TO-DO LIST has been a magazine and a blog. Now it’s a book, To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soulmate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us, a collection of 100 lists and the stories behind them.
- True Office Confessions: No “About” section, but pretty self-explanatory.

Urbis: … a community of creative people that offers sophisticated tools to help advance creativity and expose it to an audience.

Just for the record, if I were making such a list of user-generated storytelling sites, I would include SMITH Magazine, which list-maker Larry Smith co-founded with Tim Barkow. The magazine is described as a home for storytelling of all forms, with a focus on personal narrative. Smith is also the co-editor of SMITH Mag’s New York Times bestseller, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

I find The Postcard Project (special props for production values) and Urbis fantastic but probably would not include them because they veer more toward fiction and creative writing (peripheral interests but not the real purview of A Storied Career).

Finally, I’d like to think our president-elect’s Web people would heed the way user-generated storytelling sites/blogs are supposed to work. Contrary to what I reported in yesterday’s entry about the way change.gov works, the blogs listed above work the way they are supposed to — users generate their stories, then see them published, and see the stories of others.