The Cult of Me

How Social Technologies Will Save the Story

Archiving the Distributed Story: I Have No Idea

My buddy Glenn Platt, a professor and program director at Miami (OH) University, and I were chatting the other day about distributed stories.
I feel confident that I know what a distributed story is, how you build a network to tell those stories and some tools you might use that don’t seem obvious.
More importantly, he asked [...]

journalists versus bloggers

Finally found the link (via Twitter) for Scott Rosenberg’s new book. I’ve been awaiting this chapter in particular: Journalists versus Bloggers.

Distributed Storytelling: Why You Need a Predictive Market

I just had a long conversation with Sophia B. Liu, a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who is — and I will bastardize the heck out of this — working on a thesis about how to build tools to allow for distributed story and archiving of events.
I know I’ve not accurately [...]

Why Analytics (Mostly) Don’t Matter

Analytics are important to me. I’m a child of the Internet. A Web nerd. A baseball geek. I love me some numbers.
But numbers aren’t all they are cracked up to be particularly online and really particularly when you’re trying to build a business around them. Any salesperson will tell you that.
There is information to be [...]

3 Steps to Building a Distributed News Organization

I was talking with Glenn Platt, the director of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami (Oxford) University, about what a distributed news organization would look like today. He’s intrigued by my ideas and asked me a simple question: so what does this (functionally) look like.
Sans drawing paper, I couldn’t show him. But [...]

On Language + Knowledge

I was having a discussion with one of the Computer Scientists from Northern Kentucky University about the convergence of communication and programming.
We were discussing my decision to leave NKU and take a position at Ball State University, and reflecting on the one class we team-taught (actually, she taught it; I was a guest lecturer once [...]

3 Types of Puzzles in The Go Game

I’ve had the chance to see Chris and Mei discuss The Go Game, a team building exercise that requires small groups to work together to complete different puzzles that are sent to them on mobile phones.
There are 3 primary puzzles:

Sleuthing: trivia
Inter-Team: head-to head networking, battle of wits, talent and skills
Creative: open-ended prompts that require the [...]

Trading on Influence

While I was in London, I had the opportunity to visit Joanna Geary at The London Times. We’d been trying to meet since South by Southwest Interactive and finally — FINALLY — we made that happen.
The Times, part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, is doing what his other media properties are doing: searching for the new [...]

What Iran Is Teaching Us About Distributed Storytelling

For some time, I’ve had this sense that the ways in which we have been discussing “interactivity” when it comes to storytelling has been wrong.
In this little thought exercise, interactivity is short for anything that requires users to engage in some action, but an action that is limited by the tools provided by the storytellers. [...]

A Brief History of the Future of the Story

I’ve spent the last 16 hours discussing the future of the story. Not non-fiction versus fiction versus conversation. The future of how we tell, distribute, share, interact with, the effects of and the dangers of stories.
It’s been amazing and I’ll be posting thoughts from my interview with Penguin Books, Six to Start and a host [...]

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