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!

Since we started with the concept of EN we had a certain idea of what it would be like. Now we have the first working version the possibilities seem endless, but what is the killer application or function? What is it that gives new options to the things we do with news?

In this post I’m just thinking out loud and writing down some thoughts. Please share your ideas or fallacies you see in my thoughts.

In News presentation we see the article as an article. It’s a finished story. On a news website, newspaper or television broadcasts we present a collection articles and items. These articles are also objects. Finished stories presenting a near live experience, but not live.

For the presentation and sorting of these objects news media are using a few options.
1. We show it by editorial selection (the far most popular by newspapers, television and news websites).
2. We show it sorted on time (often combined with the first)
3. We show the article list sorted on popularity (often somewhere on an extra page or column)

This works very well. We are used to see a pre-selection made from all the information and from this selection we choose the things we like. News reading is scanning through a pre-selection made by editors.

But the object (article) itself has a very interesting set of meta-information. This is what we potentially know about, and can extract from an article on EN.nl.

Tags, time published, pageviews, updates, incoming links, comments, votes (1-4), urgency levels (1-3), edits, editors, editors popularity, dateline (geocoordinates), related articles, favorites, pictures, videos, hyperlinks

This is information we know about each article. It is metadata connected to the object. What can we do with this information? Obviously presenting the news is critical for a news website, but the added value is in the selection made by editors. Why do these selections work so well? A selection by editors is based on the values of the presenter (newspaper) and often focus extra on certain aspects of the news. Left, right, popular, politics, celebrity, sports, art…

Most news media present the same facts. Is it the hierarchy and presentation that really counts? Is it what you show or don’t show that adds value? Is it what you’re friends read and what you can talk about with them? Do you go to certain websites for coverage about certain items? Are it the extra stories that add value? Are it writing skills? Is it the fast coverage?

Adding relevancy and new value
How can we make the selection and the sorting of objects (articles) more relevant to your needs? Should we ask you what you like? Should we track what you read? Should we ask you social profile? Should we ask your social network? Should we do things with your location? Should we read the tagging you did on your blog, del.ico.us, flickr and youtube and use this to determine what you like? Should we make your music taste count, the weather or how you feel today?

I think news is social by itself. We want to be able to talk about it with friends. Serious news, but also weird or funny news, sports and celebrities. Every real-life social network connects to certain news media. Your friends are often reading the same newspaper or same websites.

Would you be interested in what news your social network reads? Or your favorite bloggers? If you look at articles as if they are objects with metadata you can think up a lot of new ideas and possibilities. But what does really add extra and new value to presenting the news?

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.

Hypernarrative has a catagory about interactive storytelling. Well the send.a.message project couldn’t be more about interactive storytelling. You send a message through the website, for €30,- a Palestinian sprays your tag on the West Bank Barrier and sends you in return the photos of your text on the wall.

I don’t like walls, they never really solved problems. We build a wall when the difference between two places or cultures seems too complex to be solved.

We lock up criminals, because they clash with society. We build walls around our belongings because we want to control the climate and protect our belongings. We build closed compounds in rural areas to ‘protect’ ourselves and our belongings. And sometimes we build walls around or through countries.

A wall will never solve a problem, it will make things controllable for a certain time by limiting freedom.

Edge, the world question center asked scientists the question ‘what have you changed your mind about? why?‘ It’s an interesting collection of people telling something very personal. Changing your mind is good, although it often takes some courage because it feels like admitting a mistake.

What I changed my mind about
I believe in a future for hypernarrative in storytelling, navigating through a non-linear structure of pieces of information that gives you a personalized story. I thought in 2007 interactive storytelling would have it’s online breakthrough like YouTube had the year before. I thought companies would start to experiment with serious interactive stories since bandwidth, computers and technology are no longer limiting factors.

I was wrong, storytelling did take an enormous leap in 2007, not because of professional producers, but by people starting to embrace notification media. Websites like Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Hyves and Flickr. Online storytelling grew not because of bandwidth and fancy interactive video but because of text.

With notification media we tell short fragments that are by itself almost worthless. But once you follow someone and read (parts of the) the stream of fragments a story is created.

It had nothing to do with bandwidth or technology. It had probably more to do with a state of mind and a younger or open generation of web users who are not being afraid to expose a lot of personal information online. Information about yourself. Where you are, what you are doing and if you like it or not. Todays teenagers choose between privacy and identity and for them identity beats privacy.

The popularity of notification services brings a new challenge for search engines. Indexing a blog post or article is easy compared to indexing a fragmented story. Notifications aren’t tagged, often they don’t follow up on each other and I’m not sure if you can even solve this by introducing a complete semantic web.

By adding the live notifications the web brought more meaning to some people and less to the computers indexing it. Let’s see who is the first to make useful information of this rapid growing amount of fragmented notification data, Google?

Read about what Kevin Kelly and Xeni Jardin changed their minds.
Kevin Kelly (Wired) about Wikipedia
Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing) about the online community

2006 was the year of the people (Time magazine said so) In 2007 the elite joined the discussion, and more outspoken than they had been in the last years. In short, the web is crap! Or at least a lot on the web is crap.

Andrew Keen talked about how everyone has the same voice, we don’t check facts or sources and basically create an environment with so much * useless * information that it could have a negative effect on culture in general.

I don’t believe public / universal access to information and publishing can have a (lasting) negative effect on culture, creativity or anything else. What I do believe is that the discussion is connecting the problem to the wrong cause.

What’s the problem?
The real problem isn’t that everyone has access to information or can publish anything he or she wants. The problem is you can’t find what you want and are confronted with the things you don’t want to see or know.

In an ideal situation the web only gives you the correct answer to what you need or want.

The discussion shouldn’t be about the mass joining and filling the web with everything and photos of their cat. The discussion should be about how do we enhance our filters.

The discussion only emphasizes that filters and thus search engines aren’t yet good enough, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

Developing the signal to noise ratio
2007 was about social recommendations and social networks. The social web works with filters by like minded and ‘friends’. Mix this with the power of a search engine like Google and we are closer to the next stage of navigating through information on the web.

Don’t say that what people make or do is not good enough or wrong. Just be happy they tried.

I have updated the original photo in this post with a new one.

This is me, these are words extracted from every 850+ post ever published on hypernarrative. This is meta data; data about data. It tells you what hypernarrative is about, and since it’s kind of a personal blog it also tells you something about me. These words are related to the things I care about.

The size emphasizes its frequency and thus importance. Sure, most of these tags are general words. The value is not in the individual tag but in the collection of tags.

The last years semantic classification in the form of tags got really big. Not mainstream, but big. Why? Because it is a raw classification, you don’t need to know classification structures to order data the same way scientists used to know to order species (how many legs does this creature have?). Tags are free and easy, I can tag objects the way I like, there are no rules and you don’t need any knowledge.

In the last years we have created a new layer to information on the web, we tagged hyperlinks, photos, video’s, presentations and articles. Almost every new website gives us the option to tag. Tags are the new categories. Categories are closed, tags are open and infinite.

My semantic profile
But what if we trace tags back? Tags tell you something about the tagger. What if you would trace back all my web accounts and the tags I have used. If you collect this information in a database you have a semantic layer about me. I have a semantic profile, and this is valuable.

It shouldn’t be difficult the come up with an application that can use this. For example you could make a social network that automatically connects you to other people that have similar interests through the tags they have used on Flickr (what they have seen for real) on YouTube (what they made) on Delicious (what they like) on blogs (what they care about) and more.

It would create a cross websites social network that doesn’t need an invitation system. It just connects you to minds alike based on what you have done already. Maybe it’s already out there.

Link to the picture on Flickr