Perry

Hewitt

Tag: storytelling

  • Friday 5 — 8.29.2014

    Friday 5 — 8.29.2014

    1. hyperlapseIt didn’t take long for Hyperlapse, a new, stand-alone app for time lapse videos, to reach the #3 spot in the app store. Created by the team at Instagram, the app has a sleek, simple user experience that belies the sophisticated capabilities under the hood. At right, my first attempt to magically speed up traffic in Harvard Square. Click to view on Instagram.
    2. A few weeks back, it looked like Google was going to buy Twitch, the livestreaming platform for videogames — much to the consternation of the site’s 55 million users. This week, Amazon picked up Twitch for just under $1 billion. Here’s why.
    3. One way to visualize the impact of the Napa Valley earthquake is to take a look at how many people woke up. How would you do that? By charting anonymized user data from the Jawbone Up API.
    4. What makes the most shareable content on social? KISSmetrics’ marketing blog shares useful specifics including word count for various platforms, and the optimal length for Facebook (just over 4 minutes, apparently). Longform content can spread, but articles must be formatted in a way that’s easy to read, with lots of visuals interspersed with the text.
    5. This clever project meets a need we didn’t know we had: one pagers for tech trends. Each one-pager comes in both a long and a compact version, with useful charts and must-reads.

    Weekend fun:  How can you make Game of Thrones even geekier? Add in some old school video game sound effects. You’ve been warned: serious nostalgia trigger for gamers over 30. Fun fact: there are now more adult women gamers than teenage boys.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.

  • Friday 5 — 08.09.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Anyone who has ever clicked on a search result only to land on an article stub generated by a content farm will be glad to see this latest Google tweak. This update highlights up to three in-depth articles in the right column, pointing users toward deeper content (and perhaps directing their eyes toward the ads). Big opportunity for publishers of high-value, evergreen content.
    2. 72% of U.S. online adults now use social networks, according to Pew. Breakdowns include slightly more women than men, and Hispanics represented more than African-Americans more than white, non-Hispanic. Retailers take note: adoption rates for adults 65 and older have tripled over the past four years.
    3. A good example of how great content strategy combined with optimizing an existing technology can yield significant returns: Zach Seward on Quartz’s email strategy just as their daily brief expands to weekends.
    4. Boston’s Here and Now covered Silicon Valley-funded Watsi, a startup crowdfunding medical care. This approach raises ethical questions, as well as potential positive implications for nonprofits looking to put a face on unrestricted giving.
    5. In yet another take on mobile, visual storytelling, YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen launched the Mixbit video app for iOS. There’s a collaborative element to the storytelling and some solid UX to make recording and editing less daunting.

  • Try it: 3 ways to tell a story online

    Compelling content is a differentiator in a world where everyone is an online publisher. That content can take entirely new forms: data visualization (like this recurring developments site from Beutler Ink) or inspired curation (like Brainpickings by Maria Popova). And of course multimedia plays an ever larger role in online storytelling. Last year’s groundbreaking New York Times feature on the avalanche at Tunnel Creek has even turned snow fall into a verb.

    New apps and platforms are springing up to entice a wider range of people to try multimedia and interactive storytelling. Three to consider:

    1. Storyteller
    Last week Amazon released Storyteller, a quickly and easy way for writers to storyboard their scripts. The scripts have to be in Studios but the service, still in beta, is free (except for a 45-day option). This feels like a grown-up version of xtranormal, and a way for writers to more quickly envision the creative potential of a script. Best of all, you can use the tool to storyboard others’ scripts in a more public and collaborative environment.

    2. Tapestry
    When not ruining our lives with Dots, the people over at betaworks have been polishing version 2.0 of Tapestry. Tapestry is a mobile app aimed at beautiful, short-form storytelling. I gave it a try — the admin user experience is clean and simple on the admin side, and the consumer experience of tap to-advance on mobile is oddly addictive kind of like, well, Dots.

    puppy story

    3. Zeega
    Finally, more interesting developments in interactive storytelling over at Zeega. Originally a collaboration at Harvard, Zeega is now among the first cohort of media entrepreneurs over at Matter VC. The platform enables slick integration of audio and video, and has attracted a creative community masterful with found assets. There’s enough complexity to be able to create pieces for a recent exhibit at SFMOMA — but it’s also a way to have a lot of fun with your ABCs and the Jackson 5.

    The most encouraging thing about all these apps is the way they are lowering the technical bar for creative storytelling online. It recalls how blogging liberated text publishing from the webmasters and multimillion dollar content management systems in the early 2000s. These are three to watch — and to try.