Martin Jefferies

As promised, here’s the final part of my round up from Friday’s Digital Storytelling ’10 conference at London’s South Bank University.

Ultra Knowledge

Now, these guys could be a godsend for journalists the world over! Just check out what they’ve done for the Independent’s online search facility. No, it’s not the standard list of titles, descriptions and links we’ve become used to seeing. This is the ‘NewsWall’ – a visual representation of your 30 closest matches, with each result displayed as a thumbnail image that, when you scroll over, loads a snapshot of the story on the right-hand side. Clever stuff, especially when you consider that the Indy’s journalists aren’t required to tag stories or fill out complex SEO data, freeing them up to concentrate on, well, journalism. As Andrew Lyons from Ultra Knowledge said:

“Writing stories should be the hard bit; that’s an art form in itself. There are solutions out there which can do all the production work for you.”

Meanwhile, Adam Westbrook notes that the NewsWall is also searchable by date:

“Thousands of articles, currently consigned to history, will have new life breathed into them. New sponsorship, new ad revenue.”

Ultra Knowledge are also doing some excellent work with Twitter. Their ‘Wheel’ and ‘Timeline’ tools’, which display relationships between tweeps and show who was tweeting at what time, could be extremely useful for covering certain events. They’ve also come up with a way of polling people via Twitter and updating a web graphic in real time. I’d like to get my hands on that in time for the election…

1000heads

Molly Flatt from 1000heads (‘The Word of Mouth People’ who help clients like Nokia and Sainsbury’s understand the power of things like social media, blogs and media sharing sites) gave a really good talk, discussing the meaning of storytelling in a digital age.

It was a really thought-provoking half an hour or so and had us thinking about four main topics: comics (Molly says the next level of storytelling will be mobile-driven augmented reality, combining virtual data and the physical world); heroes (with big brands personalising their promotional work, making the audience feel like superheroes); symbols; and myths. There’s lots more on 1000heads’ blog.