March 11, 2010
We’re big fans of SXSW Interactive here at Fourth Story Media, and this year we thought that in addition to attending the festivities, and sitting on a panel, we’d try out a little storytelling experiment…
Starting this Friday, March 12th at 10 AM central time, we’ll be hosting an interactive storytelling exquisite corpse-esque competition over at The Future of the Story. How it works:
- Follow us on Twitter to receive the kickoff sentence for each story (contributed by some of your favorite web storytellers)
- @ reply to @itwasadarkand with what you think happens next; your sentence will show up here
- Vote up the best sentence
- Every round, the winning sentence becomes part of the story and it’s time to write the next!
Once each story closes, we’ll be adding it to our story archive where it will be given a title and illustrated by Figure-1. AND (just to make things super extra saucy fun) we’ll be choosing one contributor from each story at random to win a choice of radtastic books (either Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More, or Jeffrey Zeldman’s A Book Apart), AND the original, signed illustration that accompanied their story!
Anyone and everyone is invited to play. We’ll be starting things off easy with two stories on Friday (new lines added approximately every 30 minutes, second story up around 4 PM), and we’ll ramp up from there depending on how feverishly you type. If you’re at
SXSW, be sure to look for our buttons inside of your Big Bags, and watch for FSM’s
Lisa Holton and
Erin Kissane handing out our limited edition totes (both pictured here). Whoohoo! UPDATE:
The first story “Bearly Noir” is complete! Read it now.
Read all of the finished stories!
July 9, 2009
We recently stumbled upon Storytellin – a Twitter feed that aggregates Delicious bookmarks about storytelling – when a tweet about Fourth Story popped up. The links are great.
Some tweet treats we’ve loved:
- My Milk Toof: A story about the adventures of a small tooth named Ickle, and his buddy Lardee told through daily pictures (see photo)
- Purefold: Ridley Scott’s new project that will scan social networking sites for online conversations across social media to be “used by brands as the basis for storylines that are fleshed out and rewritten by professional scriptwriters.”
- The Wikipedia pages on Folklore, and Transmedia Storytelling
- Guillermo Del Toro’s quote about the Story Engine: “In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment – film, television, video, games, and print – melding into a single-platform ’story-engine.’”
- Blabberize: Make photos talk!
- One-Sentence: True stories told in one sentence.
February 24, 2009
This caught my eye this morning:
Women’s publisher and advertising network Glam is seeking to make money by editing streams from Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook’s status updates.
During the Oscars (it’s second run with the idea – first tested over Fashion Week), Glam’s entertainment editors edited down the standard #Oscars Twitter feed into a widget on their homepage. The result was Glam approved commentary that advertisers felt comfortable with, leading Aveeno to sign on as a sponsor of the branded widget.
The micro-blogging widgets are significant because they’re one of the first ways a company has tried to monetize microblogging through editing. Glam is calling its edited news wire “gWire.” Until now, microblogging has largely been either one-to-one or open to all. Glam lets both its own publishers and other third-party publishers embed the widgets on their websites…
Publishers in Glam’s network using the widget get a share of the revenue generated by the advertising. Within “a few weeks,” even publishers outside the network will be able to receive payments, via micro-payments from PayPal.
It will be really interesting to see if more magazines and news outlets go this monetized curating route in upcoming months. Venture Beat has Glam’s chief executive Samir Arora as saying that the feature is best used when anchored to an offline event such as the Oscars since there’s not only a steady stream of commentary, but a sponsor can buy branding on everything from the widget box to the physical event itself to display ads on Glam’s sites, as well as ads on video modules.
(via Venture Beat)
November 4, 2008
The internet is all aflutter with today’s historic election:
If you’re in New York, and looking for a place to watch the results come in tonight, there are plenty of places to go.
Happy Election Day!
October 29, 2008
First Twittories, then Don Draper. Now, writer Nikki Katz is twittering a story called MyLifeIn140:
The story takes the form of frequently updated tweets, which relate the main character’s thoughts and the events around her. Because the story only started a few days ago most of the tweets are related to character development and could have come from any angsty teenager, but the seeds of a story have been planted.
To be honest, there’s no way I’d ever want to follow MyLifeIn140 for any length of time, especially with tweets like:
“Doing the layout of the page with Caleb’s pic. Swoon. He looks hot! White shirt sets off his tan and his green eyes pop. And that hair…”.
But I’m not the target audience. I could see MyLifeIn140 and similar stories taking off at high schools, with the same kind of virality seen by the fictional LonelyGirl15 video series that managed to amass a huge following and spawned several spinoffs. And periodically updated text stories have been very popular abroad, where a significant number of best selling books were written from mobile phones.
(via TechCrunch)
