That's an interesting little article. The author comments that traditional story-telling can be boiled down to 4 elements: 'Once upon a time', 'Suddenly', 'Luckily' and 'Happily ever after' - a quite amusing conclusion. He then comments that all this is lost in 'web story-telling'.

As I commented in my white paper 'Content that works', a decent web user experience does involve a story-telling principle of sorts. But whereas a book presents its 'story' in a linear fashion, the web turns it non-linear. As such, the user effectively creates his or her own story - akin to those 'Dungeons & Dragons'-type books where you navigate your own way through one of any number of possible paths and scenarios.

So it's different from conventional story-telling and, as such, requires a separate approach to creation. But many of the base principles remain, namely to engage the reader/user in an ultimately satisfactory experience - albeit one that is self-created.

It would be interesting to imagine a web equivalent of a book like Orwell's 'Animal Farm'. You could decide that the sheep, not the pigs, rule the roost, read biogs of our porky friends Napoleon and Snowball, view a 360 degree photo of the farm - perhaps even wipe the whole lot out with an attack of BSE and foot-and-mouth. An intriguing thought...

So where are the best 'stories' being 'told' on the web? Thoughts and views, please...

On 11:13:20 24 May 2001 campus77 wrote:
>I have found an information about Web storytelling at the
>link www.hypergene.net/ep2001/ep2001_1.html that coincides
>with the article from Sam saying that the content should
>be like telling a story. Anybody agree or disagree about
>this?