Tell Me A Story

It is accepted these days that one of the primary functions of the Internet is content creation. Users revel in the ability to upload photos and videos and even dictate what trends on traditional news. With so many ways to create your own content on more and more niche sites are appearing with the concept of online storytelling becoming very popular. Because of this we thought we would give you a little taste of some creative storytelling happening on the web.

Children’s Stories Online:
The internet can be such a fun playground for children - filled with interactive games and now a full library at their disposal. There are multiple sites that offer children’s stories narrated by the author or even a famous celeb.

This example from Jr Nick tells the story of the hungry penguin that keeps hearing its stomach go “grumble grumble”. It is narrated by none other than Woopi Goldberg and has cool interactive functions such as page turning and images that make a noise when you move your mouse over them. It’s super cute and brings a new dimension to children’s books that I wish was around when I was a little squirt.

Penguin have come up with a rather genius online story telling idea called We Make Stories. On this site you can write your own children’s story, choose the illustrations, look and feel of the book and then get it printed! You are your own story teller. Great for personalised gifts, the only downside is the cost.

Grown Up Stories Online:
Moving away from all the kid stuff and looking at adult stories online (that’s mature stories, not porn), there is a trend evolving. This trend has emerged from the use of social networks such as Twitter,  photo and video sharing sites, Facebook, MySpace and blogs. These stories are twofold – some are inadvertently formed by a large social community and others are pushed by creators through the social networks.

This is a collage of images put together from a Flickr search for “Barack Obama election”, a search that produced over 51 thousand results. These images, submitted from multiple sources, tells a collective story about their experience of the latest American election. Some images are just of children playing in their living room illustrating where the average Joe was when Barrack was announced president. The overall feeling you get from the images is one of hope, positivity and jubilance.

The other side of the coin are fictional stories, created by authors and pushed through social networks. A good example of one of these viral tales is a story about a girl who had lost her dog - this first part of the story was published on a blog. Then on another blog, across the blogosphere, a young man found this stray dog. These two blogs then independently to each other started to carry on the story. Users had to read both blog in order to get the full scope of what was happening. This went on until users connected the two blogs together and the lady found her dog and love of her life. Sounds like a cheesy chick flick right? While the story might be a bit cringe, it is interesting to see how the story spread. More about this example here.

Fernando’s Flying Kebab’s Online Tale:
Similar to the blog story, Flying Kebab tells the story of Fernando and his mission to solve the mystery of his lost inheritance in Lebanon. Instead of being told through blog posts, this story is told though a series of sort videos releases. Each insert is 10 minutes long, so you can get your Flying Kebab fix in a nice digestible bite. It’s reality story telling on crack!

There is a stream of comments after each episode praising the story, cinematography and idea. The site is also linked up to Flickr and Twitter to ensure that the story spreads.

On a more serious and non fictional note: 
Emerging leaders in multimedia storytelling, MediaStorm tell stories that appeal to universal emotion inherent in all of us. They are quit literally kicking the ass of the likes of National Geographic Online and Current TV. According to freelance writer Amanda Hirsch, the secret to their success is due a “whiz-bang, high-tech, Web2.0 approach to storytelling.”

MediaStorm focuses on director-driven narratives from stories about woman victims of the Rwanda genocide called Intended Consequences to the juxtaposed lives of two Midwestern families – one that watches as their farm is replaced by cookie-cutter suburban houses, while other creates a life together in one of those houses – called “Common Ground”.

Im really interested where online story telling will take us in the future. Im looking forard to seeing ideas that attempt to tie in the physical world with the digital throught the medium of stroy telling. I couldn’t think of a more eloquent ending to this post than this quote from Brian Storm, the founder of MediaStorm:

“There's no one solution on the web, We all own a printing press now, so for sure, you will see a variety of approaches, some new, some old, some good, some bad, play out in this space."