Tracking Transmedia

Fascinating...

5. “The way I see the future of interactive storytelling is basically creators crafting mini brains.” (Aaron Koblin, Creative Director of Google Data Arts Team)

The intersection of data, conversation and art is a major topic – and one that is inspiring artists, data scientists and many others. Aaron is at the center of this, through his role at Google and background at MIT. Data is a big topic of conversation throughout the day, because of the central role that storytelling takes in adding meaning to data...

There's an interesting question on Quora right now:

If you had to pick between an amazing product designer or an amazing engineer to build a new company around, which would you pick and why?

This question reflects a painful problem that is common at both small startups and large corporate organizations. Far too often, teams focus on execution before defining the product opportunity and unique value proposition. The result is a familiar set of symptoms including scope creep, missed deadlines, overspent budgets, frustrated teams and, ultimately, confused users. The root cause of these symptoms is the fact that execution focuses on the how and what of a product. But in a world where consumers are inundated with choices, products that want to be noticed and adopted must be rooted in the why....

This post is by Kendall Whitehouse, Wharton's director of new media.

To no one's surprise, the highest-grossing movie this weekend was Marvel Studio's The Avengers, which brought in more than $200 million in the U.

Published on Oct 3, 2012 by FoST org

For generations, the relationship between storyteller and audience has been largely one-sided, but today, as the visionary entertainment consultant Brian Seth Hurst explains in this illuminating film, audience and storyteller can achieve levels of engagement with each other that were never possible in the pre-Internet, pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter era. And this fact is fundamentally changing the way stories and storyworlds are conceived, disseminated, and branded. Hurst sees four distinct levels of conversation between storytellers and their audience, each one progressively more engaging and intimate. The most basic level is what Hurst calls "Here's the Story." This is the way mass media has been presented to audiences since the dawn of the printed word; at this level storytellers have a limited ability to interact with their audience, beyond tracking ticket sales or TV ratings or bookstore receipts in order to understand whether they were reaching their audience effectively or not. The second level of conversation is called "I'm Listening." Storytellers at this level are doing just that: paying attention to fan fiction sites, for example, or Twitter and Facebook communities, and then using that feedback to guide them as they craft future storylines—the audience has been heard! The third level of conversation builds on that connection; Hurst dubs it "My World, and Welcome To It."...

What Significant Objects suggests about the relationship between stories and stuff.

Find answers to some of fans' most popular questions in this special panel with Masterpiece Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch, co-creator Steven Moffat and ...

[check out the comment thread - love it:

"Benedict's mum was a friend of Jeremy Brett.
For some reason, that just seems awesome."]