Hi, hypernarrative is a blog by Wilbert Baan about Art, Media and Technology with a focus on interactive storytelling. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Google or Netvibes. I'll post a few messages a week. Thanks for visiting!

Last week I did an experiment with a linear story and loading photos from Flickr. This week I made a second experiment using the same code and adding a map. I will try to tell a second story.

About the story
This story is about how fast urban areas are growing. These growing areas aren’t in the west. Of the 100 fastest growing urban areas only two are located in what we call the western world.

In an era where our lives get globally connected through similar culture, mass production and consumption these emerging areas will play a very important role in the near feature.

I’ll try to tell this in a short linear story with the latest photos loaded from Flickr and a map that shows the lights of the world. I love that map.

Try it yourself http://www.wilbertbaan.nl/flickrcities/

“UN figures for urbanisation, published this week in the State of the World 2007 report, show that more than 60 million people - roughly the population of the UK - are added to the planet’s cities and suburbs each year, mostly in low-income urban settlements in developing countries. Unplanned urbanisation is taking a huge toll on human health and the quality of the environment, contributing to social, ecological, and economic instability in many countries.”

Guardian January 17th 2007

Difficult
The most difficult part in making this animation is to actually tell a complex story in slides. I want to make something that will make you think about things for a while. The previous Flickr project was easy because you didn’t have to pay much attention. It was a collection of things. This one is more a story making it more difficult to make an impression.

Storytelling tips
The most important thing in interactive storytelling is probably to kill your darlings and only use effects, technology and interactivity if you think it will benefit to the story you want to tell.

Make sure to write out what you want to say. It doesn’t have to be final, but it gives you an idea of what you want to do.

Focus on what you want to say. Focus on the impression your story will have.

All data used in the animation is from this list. Hypernarrative won’t be updated until the first week of March.

Share your best tips and tricks to tell an interactive story? How can I make this better?

Today I experimented with the Flicrk API. An API is an external programmable interface that connects to a database, it allows external developers to access the content in the database. In this case I can access the photos on Flickr by using a free license (API-key).

2.269.526.982 photos
Everyday millions of photos are uploaded to Flickr. While writing this post 4.871 pictures are uploaded every minute and the total of photos uploaded to Flickr is 2.269.526.982. Most of these photos are tagged with meta information, like a title, description, user generated tags and device generated (shutter speed, type of camera, coordinates). That’s a lot of information.

Slideshow experiment
For this first experiment I use thirteen slides to tell something general about myself. Every slide loads the most recent images from the Flickr database based on a tag that corresponds to the slide.

The slideshow plays by itself and has no interaction, it’s linear, but not static. Every time you play the slideshow the content can be different, the story won’t.

www.wilbertbaan.nl/flickrapi/

How would you combine live data feeds with storytelling?

Last week I made the Aphextwinalizer, a Flash gimmick that uses your webcam to show your photo on the cover of your favorite record. I made it as an experiment. It didn’t take long and I wanted to experiment with Flash, webcams and screenshots.

A colleague had seen the experiment and heard about an article that would be published in todays newspaper. The article would be about the suggested burqa-ban and what partial face covering does to open communication. The motivation behind the burqa-ban is that it obstructs open communication.

The colleague suggested if she could use the aphextwinalizer for this. We took the pictures from the article, photoshopped the journalists face out of it and turned it into an online test. “How does your face look when parts of it are covered?”

Just a gimmick, but since the source file was already there it only took a short amount of time to edit the photos and turn this into an interactive extension of the article. We would have never made this if there wasn’t the experiment in the first place.

Bruce Mau
From the incomplete manifesto for growth by Bruce Mau Design.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

What are you doing? Is the simple question twitter asks you

In July 2007 Edward Mischaud (at that time student Politics and Communication) asked me - and other random selected users - a few questions about how we use Twitter. His goal was to find out if Twitter users actually answer to one thing Twitter asks ‘What are you doing?‘.

65% of his focus group didn’t answer this question. What they did write about is in the graphic below.

These findings correlate with the theoretical foundation presented which is based on the understanding that technologies are not neutral objects that operate apart from society’s influence. Technologies are flexible devices. People often extract different meanings and uses out of a technology – applications that are not always factored into its design. In some instances, however, inventors, or shapers, of technology can themselves determine how a technology is to be used and therefore limit and restrict its ‘interpretative flexibility’.

Download the MSc dissertation by Edward Mischaud *.pdf

What are you doing?
I think the question itself is very important for Twitter. It’s the step that makes it easy to join the conversation. You don’t know what to do, just answer what you’re doing.

With this you start the storytelling. Eventually you start connecting with friends or try to start a discussion. You see people talk about other people and start following them or they start following you. This is how your network grows.

Twitter probably wouldn’t be equally successful without this question. With a simple and personal question that everyone in the world can answer Twitter really lowered the barrier to join the application.

Twitter is more a network than an application. If you ask around you will notice that most people are using different interfaces on different platforms and clients. Because of the API connecting to the network adapts to your preferred way of working.

Twitter

• Is easy accessible
• Is live
• Forces you to focus
• Is broken conversation
• Is open conversation
• Is spam free, like RSS (subscription based)
• Is a network
• Is synchronous / asynchronous
• Is a black hole
• Is a time capsule
• Is a centralized network
• Changes public / privacy
• Is a knowledge base
• Is very unstable
• Is making it very difficult for search engines
• Is platform independent

The best part of twitter to me is the live/buzz effect. What is happening right now. You just turn it on like you turn on television. There’s always something going on, and if it isn’t you can always start it by saying what you’re doing. The two graphs below show how twitter is being used during live events. The same thing happens in the Netherlands during live sport events, news or television shows.

Twitter during the Superbowl

Twitter during Super Tuesday

Examples

Some conferences have used Twitter for a so called backchannel. A live (sometimes moderated) screen behind the speaker that allows the audience to discuss and ask live questions via Twitter and SMS.

Every morning @gvenk presents the Gvenk Daily. Gerard is a programmer and knows what’s going on in the tech scene. Every morning around 7.30 he scans his RSS feeds and drops the highlights in the Gvenk Daily, a series of tweets about tech news.

Last year I wrote a post about @BreakingNewsOn, it’s a newsservice that posts rumors to Twitter and confirms them live. Building the story as it happens.

The Twitgeist is a hourly updated cloud of the most popular words used within a group of twitterazi. It tells you what’s going on.

These examples are just a few spin-offs. Like the conclusion from the dissertation. Twitter has just one rule, a maximum of 140 characters. The people using it are experimenting what they can do with this network.

Jonathan Harris has a very impressive portfolio with interactive projects. He’s an interactive storyteller and great visualizer. Last year I visited his talk at Picnic where he talked about his new project ‘The Whale Hunt‘. Today I discovered the project is public.

In May 2007 Jonathan lived for nine days with the Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow Alaska. Het went out hunting wales and documented his story in a wonderful interactive story.

“I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.”

Video: Jonathan Harris at TED 2007 about the Web’s secret Stories.

Last week the BUMA - a company that collects money and pays musicians for their airplay - started sending Dutch non-profit blogs a notion (in Dutch) that they were violating BUMA-rules because they embedded YouTube videos. Blogs are re-broadcasting the material (even through an embed) and thus they have to pay a license fee for embedding material. The same way a radio station or a venue does.

It doesn’t matter if the artist himself put his material online for embedding and sharing, since he doesn’t control the rights. Obviously BUMA doesn’t care about the fan. They don’t even specify what information is placed ‘illegal’, which artists are connected and which aren’t. They just want to sell licenses to small groups of fans and non-profit blogs.

After some buzz was generated around it in Dutch online media BUMA responded by saying it was a ‘premature response’. Case closed, for now.

Are we all broadcasters in a distributed environment?
It’s an interesting way of thinking, since the near future of the web will mostly be about sending/broadcasting, aggregating and social networks. Our presence online often exists by re-distrubuting content. Today’s website is more often a collection of data from other places. A manually aggregated hub of information.

Are you a broadcaster when you write something on your Facebook, collect links in a public del.icio.us and share your Netvibes as a public universe? Are you as a blogger a broadcaster? Everyone sharing something (photos, text, thoughts) online is broadcasting in the traditional meaning of the word. Semantics and laws never worked out very well.

Should we regard this as traditional broadcasting? I don’t think so. It’s freedom of expression. It’s sharing the things we like. We’re not uploading or adding illegal material we’re just creating our online identity by embedding and linking. Media represents us.

When are you a broadcaster on the web? Once you make money? Or when your audience reaches a substantial level. Is this blog a broadcasting? Or is it a personal outlet.

I think there is no such thing as an online broadcaster, since everyone is broadcasting and publishing. You can’t ask people to pay for this, like you don’t ask people to pay when they whistle your song in the street. Be happy with the publicity.

If you are an artist and connected to these kind of companies. I’m sure you need or like the money they collect and you deserve it all. At the same time they are taking away bits of your freedom. Think about what the effect is when you give up certain rights and alert those companies about the effect. Technology and culture often change much faster than the people looking backwards to decide what the future should look like.

Here’s a release by NEST, you can download this album for free because it is released into the public domain. It’s also beautiful and needs as much attention as it can get, because I really would like to see them performing live someday.

Nest is the collaborative project of Otto Totland (Deaf Center / Type Records) and Huw Roberts (Serein). The two started working together after forging a strong friendship as former members of the Miasmah label. This self-titled EP is their first work publicly released, so it is a great honour that we are able to offer it to you here.

Both pianists, there is little wonder that after exploring a plethora of musical styles, the two find themselves most at home writing traditionally structured pieces, with the ivories a major element throughout. The EP demonstrates clearly the innate ability the two have for song writing, borrowing from the world of film soundtracks and contemporary classical composers to craft delicate instrumental compositions.

Alongside their favoured instrument can be variously heard the plucked strings of the Welsh harp, violins, woodwind instruments, field recordings, percussion and a heady dose of mind wobbling effects. From the time Nest began writing together, one purpose was clear; to produce beautiful music free of pretense, and they do it exceptionally well.

Photo: spring is early on Flickr All my photos on Flickr are under a Creative Commons license, this means that some rights are reserved instead of all. You are free to use my photos for anything you like, although if you would like to use it for a commercial project you just have to ask me.