Story Time

VOICE OVER: My whole life is about the story. When I'm not workin', I like to work. And when I'm not doin' that, I like to kick back with a book and a dame, in that order. So when I heard that the Mad Genius was coming up with new-fangled ways of telling stories, I got the wiggles. His real name's David Kirkpatrick. I found him holed up in an old factory in Plymouth, Mass. His office was all decked out with inspirational quotes on the walls. J.D. Salinger… Joni Mitchell… and a New York Times headline from an article about him.

Reporter Sean Cole looks into MIT's plans to team up with a new movie studio in Massachusetts to create the storytelling technology of the future.

MIT & Storytelling

The Center for Future Storytelling will be co-directed by three Media Lab principal investigators: V. Michael Bove Jr., an expert in object-based media and interactive television; LG Associate Professor Cynthia Breazeal, a leader in the field of personal robots and human-robot interaction; and Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar, a pioneer in the development of new imaging, display and performance-capture technologies.

Kept forgetting to post this.

Memo to Newspapers: stop writing useless stories

From Publishing 2.0.

To do this, they [newspapers] have to practice innovation-by-omission. That is, they need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written.

Newsrooms no longer have the luxury of wasting resources on non-stories...They no longer have the luxury, in an information-overload world, of wasting readers’ time with non-stories or information readers already know. Readers will simply go somewhere else.

Content: the third way, pretend you are 19

Or 14.

Then there’s the troublesome third argument, the one we know is true. This is the one that admits that the content that thrives in the new distribution-and-display systems is suspiciously different from the American popular culture we used to love even 10 years ago. Thrillers, it seems, don’t flourish on Hulu. No one is reading a six-part investigative series about mayoral malfeasance on Twitter. And if it’s the afterthought message boards — the ones moderated by interns — that draw all the traffic, why are we in old media pouring so much money and time into “main event” programming that goes unread and unviewed?

NYT on the content truth that dare not speak its name.

People who work in traditional media and entertainment ought either to concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the exclusive audience of TV viewers or magazine readers that might pay for craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending a day on Twitter or following a recipe from a Mark Bittman video played on a refrigerator that automatically senses what ingredients are missing and texts an order to the grocery store (it will soon exist!). Then they should think about what content suits these new modes of distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types, mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret we have been missing.

Writers: pimp your story or else

...how to win? That, of course, is the billion-dollar question, and armies of people tackle it, every day: the dark art of manipulating Google's algorithms, otherwise known as search engine optimisation (SEO), has become a big business in the last 10 years. "A common way to get a lot of links very quickly is by getting people in India or somewhere to make them for you," says Paul Roach, the Guardian's head of SEO.

There are more aggressive, automated ways, too - scripting, using hijacked computers to add links to blogs, hacking messageboards - but these are referred to, in somewhat Disney-esque fashion, as "black hat" methods, and Google thoroughly disapproves: in fact, if you're caught using them, you're immediately banned. "We're what you call white hat," says Roach. "We follow Google's terms of service. Then again, we've got no reason not to - Google trusts the Guardian, so we generally do all right."

Blog will, as I said earlier in the week, eat itself.

"Now," says Karp, "everything is up for grabs", and every piece has to fight for attention on its own merits. It isn't enough just to publish it: you suddenly have this "whole idea of actually having to market the news - how do you get it emailed around? How do you get it on to Twitter, or Digg [a content-sharing site]? And whose responsibility is it to flog stories? The PR department? The editorial staff? It's what bloggers do - they're out there hustling, interacting with each other a lot. You actually have to engage in a more social dynamic." He compares old and new media to the difference between standing in front of a room and giving a speech, and going to a party: it isn't enough just to walk into a room - you have to get stuck in there, and start talking to people, and try to work out what they're interested in, and what they want to hear.

Timely Guardian. Read here.

Cinderella Can't Read

Ad campaign from Canada fighting illiteracy.

Perfect Recession Entertainment: talk

In New York City the trendy club to go to is The Moth where prominent people entertain a roomful of drinkers for fifteen minutes by speaking without notes.

You can see why this would appeal, particularly to middle-aged couples. Any band, other than one you are related to, is a terrible gamble for all but the professionally involved. The cinema seems exclusively aimed at teenagers. The theatre costs a fortune. You don't want to be shouted at by comics. Therefore why not go along to hear someone's interesting opinions or experiences elegantly expressed with the promise of a few jokes on the way? It seems like perfect recession entertainment.

David Hepworth from What's he on about now?.

Like it's 1899...

...

When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion— [X] tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

Close the shop, let's take a drive.

Rome: first the mini series, now the Google Remix

More here.

Tower of Babel is Back

The story of the Tower of Babel stands at the heart of how we imagine architecture. This myth hovers over every tall building; behind all criticism of skyscrapers lurks the spectre of Babel, smote for its hubris. It is a great myth but the British Museum's show reveals it is a true story.

Jonathan Jones on the new British Museum show.

Who is our Soul of the Age? AKA the Golden Triangle

From a review of Jonathan Bate's new Shakespeare book...

One could pleasurably read it as a collection of brief essays, in the freewheeling, interrogative sense of the word associated with the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais were translated into richly flavoured prose by John Florio in 1603, and whose name crops up frequently in these pages because of his demonstrable influence on Shakespeare.

One of the benefits of this approach is that it permits a cheerful agnosticism where a more linear narrative would require a decisive act of faith. There are the 'lost years', for instance, of Shakespeare's mid-twenties – a period of unknown activity between 1585 (when his twins Hamnet and Judith were baptised in Stratford) and 1592 (when he is first recorded as an actor and dramatist in London). Was he a 'schoolmaster in the country', or a lawyer's clerk, or a fugitive from justice after a poaching incident on the estates of Sir Thomas Lucy – all of which were canvassed by early biographers? Or was he that mysterious player called Shakeshaft who is documented in a Catholic household in Lancashire?

Charles Nicholl on Jonathan Bate's new Shakespeare, ah, non-fiction.


Review of Nicholl's The Lodger here.


Review of reviewer's Shakespeare by...Jonathan Bate....


All's well that ends well.

The Story Begins to Change

Get ready for a fight in this country over the political narrative. The Government will argue that it has a new progressive left ally and that McCain, who visited the Tory conference, was defeated by the left. The Conservatives will argue that time for a change defeated it's no time for a novice.

Daniel Finkelstein in The Times.

The Typographer's take on the campaign

Begins with Hilary's yellow pants suit, and ends with a prank call.

From Slideshare, ITunes for PowerPoint?

I like this, shouldn't but it is fun.

Storytelling 101

From: ethos3, 2 months ago

Storytelling 101

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: rockstar maverick)

Tips and tricks on how to create better stories for your next presentation.

Web: www.ethos3.com
Blog: blog.ethos3.com


SlideShare Link

Topicality

I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic.

Another way of conceptualizing the new news.

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something... It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

Buzzmachine & Jeff Jarvis.

Link missing at moment surprisingly...

Peter Preston, for many years the editor of The Guardian newspaper, and these days a "media" expert on the Observer wrote this yeterday in his Observer page (14):

Crucially, isn't press and broadcasting coverage getting more like blogging and less like conventional journalism? Blogging, after all, whirls on 24/7. Three in the morning, three in the afternoon. It doesn't worry much about fact checks. It exists in a tumult of constant outrage. It doesn't care what 'My View' was yesterday or last year. and to be sure, there is something of a plot there; a plot against ordinary understanding.

His story uses as a news peg of the comments of former Labour Deputy Leader (when Labour was Labour, not New Labour) Roy Hattersley, who claimed recently that political journalism here in the UK was now the "worst in the world."

For some strange reason there is no online version of Preston's article.

Yet.


There we go.

A New news Story?

The pendulum of the Lobby is ready, eager even, to turn against the too smooth, too cool Cameroons.

Guido Fawkes, seasonally, on a media desire for a 'change of narrative.'

...writing's on the wall

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

These are the stories we tell around the campfires, that sort of thing? Maybe there's not so much of it these days.

"Once you get to things like avoiding ladders and cats crossing the road, it's clear that culture and modern life have had an influence on many of these things," says Foster.

"My guess would be that in modern life, the general tendency to believe in things where we don't have scientific evidence is less beneficial than it used to be," he adds.

Hmm.

I wonder whether AOL.com is like “The CBS Evening News” — an icon from another age that serves an aging and declining audience, despite regular efforts at remodeling.

Asks the NYT.

In search of search

In the next 10 years, we will see radical advances in modes of search: mobile devices offering us easier search, Internet capabilities deployed in more devices, and different ways of entering and expressing your queries by voice, natural language, picture, or song, just to name a few. It’s clear that while keyword-based searching is incredibly powerful, it’s also incredibly limiting. These new modes will be one of the most sweeping changes in search.

Now this is really interesting. From Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience...


...at Google.

Freedom at a cost?

At yesterday's RIN Freedom of Information workshop an interesting position from Dr. Harriet Jones.

As FOI is implemented over time, it becomes harder and harder for hard-pressed officials to fulfil FOI requests within the legislated time limit. Those obligations take priority over the systematic review of records being transferred to national archives, an extremely important task which gets hopelessly de-prioritised. Inevitably, standards suffer, and neither process is satisfactory, so that researchers end up waiting so long for requests to be filled that they stop using FOI; and the quality of the records that end up getting transferred to archives deteriorates.

Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information said that around 100,000 FOI requests are made a year.


But surprisingly few academics are doing so, said Professor Duncan Tanner of Bangor University. Does that mean most historians are either working on 30 year old history - or working on partial information sets about more contemporary issues?


The Campaign for Freedom of Information blog is here.