Digital Storytelling 2004 and 2008

I wrote about Digital Storytelling August 16, 2004

16. elokuuta 2004

Digital Storytelling.

Name: James West, Journalist, Location: North West, United Kingdom.

Digital Storytelling started at the Centre for Digital Storytelling in the US.

The picture is from an event combining locally produced food and tourism to the City of Porvoo.

The idea is that there's a vast archive of interesting photos and artifacts in homes around the world, and by getting people to tell stories about themselves and post them online we can tap into this archive, and give Joe Public a chance to have some control over the media for a change.

"The BBC has gone for this in quite a big way," I wrote several years ago. What has happened since? Nobody speaks about Digital Storytelling as such anymore. People are just doing it. We've blogs, wikis, Ning, Facebook, YouTube, Microblogs, Microchannels. Millions of stories are told every single day.

Digital Storytelling? Everyone has a story to tell. Technology now allows anyone to tell it in their own way. This is more than true. We spoke today (London, Heathrow airport and Loviisa, Finland about an on-demand medical training and knowledge transfer model to support Mediracer user education. This can be made a reality today.

Digital stories are short films made by people like you using computers and personal photographs.

BBC is broadcasting a part of the stories for viewing on the big screens. I wante to apply the idea to a road information and large screen displays at service stations along the road VT 6 from Helsinki to Kajaani.

The Tech of Obamamania: Online Phone Banks, Mass Texting and Blogs

The Tech of Obamamania: Online Phone Banks, Mass Texting and Blogs:

The use of technology like blogs, mass texting and online phone banks has been key to Sen. Barack Obama's surprise sweep of recent primaries.

The Illinois senator's campaign has been making use of a range of technologies -- from ringtones to SMS -- to inspire Obamamania. And it's working. Obama's recent parade of victories in the primaries has given him a slight lead over Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"They've been using [texting] to get out the vote, which is incredibly smart because it gives people a way to take immediate political action," says Julie Germany, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. "It's just what mobile technology is suited for."

The Illinois senator is not the only candidate whose campaign is using online technology and mobile phones, but his has been one of the most effective in its embrace of new tech strategies.

On Tuesday, for example, Obama supporters who signed up with the candidate received a text message reminding them to vote. The text message included a phone number to help them find their polling station, a key feature that helped get out the vote.

Other campaigns have experimented with texting, but haven't been as effective, Germany says. Last summer, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards' campaign used text messaging to notify supporters of a televised speech. Germany, co-author of a study on the use of mobile phone technology in politics, says Edwards' campaign might as well as have used e-mail.

This week, the Obama campaign organized volunteers to make thousands of phone calls to get out the vote using an online phone-banking tool.

The technology helped the campaign target rival Hillary Clinton's base of Hispanic voters and female voters. The Obama campaign reports that volunteers made 5,000 calls in Spanish in Virginia alone, using its online Spanish phone-banking tool.

The tactic appears to have been successful. Initial exit polls on Tuesday evening showed that Obama won 54 percent of the Hispanic vote, a much bigger chunk than was expected of the electorate that up to now has mostly been voting for Clinton, according to inside-the-Beltway newspaper and website The Politico.