Two of the main reasons that I decided to study abroad was to learn more about how wearable computers can be used to change the way we communicate and to better understand the technological differences between the US and Germany. For some reason I had grand illusions that Europe and especially Germany was more technologically advanced than a lot of other countries including the US. What I found was a large digital divide between regions, age groups and social classes much like we have here in the US.

Studying abroad notably affected and broadened my career goals although it didn’t cause me to want to live or work in another country. In fact it caused me to realize how lucky I am to be in Seattle. On the other hand though, studying in Germany was fascinating because of the way higher education is structured. Graduate students are paid to work full-time on their research projects instead of competing for various scholarships.

Now that I’m back in the job market I’m testing out just how important studying abroad is to employers, but so far it seems to line up with the numbers below. One thing that kind of surprised me while I was away was how many small business ideas kept popping up. Everything from bicycle tube vending machines to competing bars with self-serve touch-screen taps.

Credit: Course Hero

If you’re still not convinced that studying abroad is worth your money, check out this TEDx talk from November with Rick Steves. While he isn’t necessarily advocating for studying abroad, his point is that spending time away from home will likely broaden your perspective and enrich your life. While I’m by no means the world traveler he is, I would have to agree; “fear is for people who don’t get out very much.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’ve studied abroad or are thinking about it please let us know your thoughts below in the comments.

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I’m talking about intellectual diversity: the ways in which MCDM students and faculty approach and solve problems, skills and abilities applied in novel and meaningful ways, and outcomes that far exceed my admittedly high expectations. The student work from Fall 2011′s COM 546 Foundations course - Narratives & Networks in Digital Media – exemplifies both the challenges and the opportunities that true diversity can provide.

Course Background

As a foundational course to the MCDM program, Narratives & Networks in Digital Media had the unique position of orienting Cohort 11 students both to the theory and also the application of many elements they will encounter in the program. Taking a bit of their own advice, this course was newly revamped for 2011, and co-taught by MCDM Director Hanson Hosein and Dr. Malcolm Parks. The result for this first incarnation? Engaging discussions, relevant lectures and guest-speakers, and tangible takeaways for professionals and creatives, alike.

Students in this course witnessed the rise of the Occupy movement, the start of the upcoming nomination and election season, and the death of Steve Jobs. Meanwhile, they engaged with new tools and platforms, tried valiantly to “publish then filter,” and were brought together in new and sometimes challenging ways. Students were exposed to basic principles of digital media, and become comfortable with the central tenet of the MCDM: to effect trusted and persuasive communication, professionals need to develop a compelling narrative tied to strategic network engagement.

With this post, we would like to share some of their work, some of the process, and some of the core philosophies of the MCDM program.

Binaries

Human beings are wired for a binary world – but not the digital binary of 0s and 1s. Rather, as humans move through their world, they inherently seek out and identify similarities and differences with the people, places, and ideas they encounter. This identification process helps us to navigate the tricky waters of modern existence by leveraging our past experiences. While this process has become an evolutionary necessity, it can also keep us from broadening our horizons and hinder our development.

In the wild – or the wilds of the workplace – being able to quickly identify something, reference it against our experience, and decide a course of action is a matter of survival. In the classroom, however, facing these tensions head-on can mean the difference between going through the motions or finding a breakthrough moment. This course was designed to leverage this human tendency to both expose students to new views on topics they were familiar with while simultaneously including topics and tools they hadn’t seen before.

As with much of the MCDM, students were given a chance to apply these new experiences in both individual and group settings.

Go Team!

In this course, students were allowed to choose a topic that resonated with them for the individual assignments. This resulted in people pursuing topics they were passionate about – but left the instructional team with a significant challenge when it came to group work: How to go about creating groups that will have enough tension to thoroughly explore an issue, but retain enough cohesion to complete the assignment?

Group work is rarely easy – yet it has become a fixture of our modern lives. This “team” mentality abounds at the workplace and at home, but despite its prevalence, the challenges remain. Learning to work together – especially when there are significant differences amongst group members – is essential. These classroom experiences offer students a chance to take risks in the name of education, where the consequences are minimized and the feedback and engagement is maximized. They are actively encouraged to try things outside of their comfort zone, both individually and in groups.

The only caveat: if you fail, fail forward.

Applied Examination

For the group assignment, students were tasked with creating:

[a] ten-minute class group presentation that gets to the heart of your story strategy, and how you engaged networked community to spread the word. This presentation should ideally incorporate a short, sharable piece of multimedia content (visual or audible) that can serve as a demonstrable artifact for your overall project. You’ll also include examples from your blogs, strategy papers, and class content. You’ll be subject to a 10-20 minute class Q&A and discussion.

Not only would students need to address their own individual applications of the principles of digital media, but they would have to create a set of packaged, compelling, cross-project narratives exploring these issues more deeply. This is truly a difficult challenge, requiring students bring to bear not only the tools and techniques they had been exposed to over the course of the quarter, but also their own experiences, talents, and skills to approach this multi-faceted problem.

Group Selection

The formation of class groups is always a challenge for the instructor. On the one hand, do you simply let the students choose their own group, and let them live with their own choices? Or, should group selection be seen as a chance to encourage students to engage with new viewpoints, individuals, and challenges that they may not choose for themselves?

In this case, I was tasked with forming the groups. Each student had submitted a one paragraph description of their Action Idea – the central narrative thread the compels both their strategy and their content. I had a good sense of who each of the 48 students were, how they interacted, and had seen some of their work product.

The real challenge was creating consistent group sizes while knowing that student’s individual topics were set. On top of that, I wanted to create opportunities for students to work with some new ideas and new peers – i.e. not the people they sat next to every week in class. Diversity amongst group members – again, talking about intellectual diversity as well – was key. Instead of creating a group that would essentially say the same thing four different ways, I worked to form groups whose overarching themes may not be so readily apparent. While I knew that the students were capable, I was pleasantly surprised with the final products.

Outcomes

The “Family” group featured one student sharing her grandmother’s photos, memories, and thoughts on a blog called Upload Your Grandma. Another student was exploring life as a 20-something who had moved back home after college.  Yet others found themselves facing challenges as a modern-day father, a mother to her children and caretaker to her parents, and one living in “the real modern family.” These individual narratives combined to paint a very compelling picture of what it means to be a part of a family today.

Featuring one blog about eating gluten-free in Seattle, one about learning to cook, one featuring the MilkBread Monster, and one about bees, the “Conscientious Consumption” team put together a great take on what, how, and why we eat – or don’t – in America today:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another group of students combined nature, boxing, robots, and collaboration to help expose kids to leadership opportunities:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yet another group leveraged their diverse backgrounds and topics to tackle Taboo Conversations:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Moving Forward

Through a combination of theory and practice, familiar and new, individual and collective, MCDM students find new and exciting ways to see their world, tell the stories they find compelling, and build and grow the communities that will make a difference for us all. Just as our students continue to grow and evolve, so does the program. If you have any questions about the MCDM program, please don’t hesitate to reach out  by email, on Twitter, on Facebook, or by phone at (206)-543-6745.

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Wikipedia is planning on replacing their standard interface with information about SOPA and PIPA, protest links and phone numbers of U.S. Representatives and Senators.  Other protesting sites will also be providing similar information on their homepages.

SOPA/PIPA reaches deeply into the MCDM curriculum.  We teach the content authoring skills that SOPA supporters are trying to protect.  We teach the ethics and practices of free and unfettered internet access.  MCDMers are at the vanguard in strategizing to content monetization.  Its hard for many of us to take a confident definitive stance on SOPA because the legislation is like a house of mirrors when it comes to what we do here at the MCDM.

In the spirit of innovation and debate, we at the Flip ask you to weigh in on the issues.  Do you support SOPA/PIPA?  Are you vehemently against SOPA/PIPA?  Are you confused by SOPA/PIPA?  We want to here from you.  Let us know what you think about these pressing issues.  Please comment below.

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No. 33 on the list, ahead of CNN’s story about the death of Steve Jobs, is a MoneyTalksNews article titled “Things Babies Born in 2011 Will Never Know.” Published on Yahoo Finance, the article was inspired by a similar Huffington Post list of 20 things that became obsolete this decade.

As we get ready to wrap up 2011 with Champagne and streamers, it seems fitting to revisit the MoneyTalks list of obsoletes.

Although we can only speculate on the Web 51.4.3 universe in which babies born this year will come of age in, no one would argue that newsletter classifieds, movie-rental stores and videotapes have gone the way of the horse and buggy. And we can only hope that Yellow Pages and dial-up will be nothing but obscure Wikipedia entries by then.

But a few things on the list are worth reconsidering. Take the idea of never forgetting anything — since all our important data and information is increasingly in our mobile phones, why bother remembering stuff, right?

Say good-bye to flashcards drilling multiplication facts into your brain, or the pain of remembering your mother’s birthday, or the punchline to that joke about the two men walking into a bar and …ummm… hang on a sec, let me pull out the BlackBerry…

Sounds great in principle, until you consider what actually happens in the brain when a human uses it for activating memory. Those 100 billion neurons and the 1,000 to 10,000 connections for each neuron didn’t magically appear after all.

Some studies have shown that it is not the size of the brain but rather the number of synapses that gives the human brain its superiority. I’m not suggesting that having information at our fingertips will degrade our brains back to the days of Homo neanderthalensi (aka Neanderthal man), but I’m not taking any chances in letting the noggin go:  Six times nine equals 54; seven times nine equals 63; eight times nine…

The other item on that list that deserves a little more respect is handwritten letters–or anything else handwritten for that matter.

Even Uncle Sam sees the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, and is considering getting out of the letter-delivery business. Think about it:  it’s perfectly acceptable today to save 44 cents and a hand–cramp by ditching the handwritten birthday or Christmas card in favor of a singing, flashing, whirling celebratory sentiment you can send to someone’s email inbox in 15 seconds. Or if you’re trendy, you can post it on someone’s Facebook wall and at the same time discreetly display your thoughtfulness to the world, or at least to the 5,000 of your closest friends.

Trends, convenience and Pony Express troubles aside, handwriting remains one of the few last things that make each one of us unique in this digital world. This original “technology” that has enabled the human race to begin collecting all that knowledge we now effortlessly store in the cloud is a tradition worth passing on to subsequent generations.

Even the public education system doesn’t think much of cursive writing anymore. Last year, cursive handwriting no longer became mandatory after new common core standards were adopted by most U.S. states including Washington.

By the time a 2011 new–born graduates from high school, will digital tablets with voice recognition replace pen and paper? Will writing by hand matter at all?

Already, kids are learning to talk and write in the short hand code favored by text messaging. Who wants to try to spell out something like “from the bottom of my heart” when FTBOMH will do. Not even me, TY! IDK y u would.

Even the “words” LOL and OMG officially became part of the Oxford English Dictionary this year. We can see where this is all going.

For me, The saddest item on the list is the end of separation of work and home. I’ve been self-employed out of a home-based office for years so I’ve forgotten long ago what that separation feels like. But maybe I’m kidding myself when I reminisce about those days in an 8-5 job when the time between 5:05 p.m. and 7:55 a.m. was nobody’s business but mine.

So I’d like to offer a toast to the babies born in 2012. May they grow up to still hang on to whatever makes their human spirit tick outside of their digital lives. May they learn to disconnect from all their gadgets once in a while. Take a few minutes to write a thank-you card by hand — or pick up the phone to say hello to a friend instead of firing off a quick text message.

Some old-fashion habits are worth preserving. IMHO.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

This past summer I got to do some deep hanging out with folks from Brazil and the Puyallup Tribe as we canoed up the Puget Sound. The encounter grew out of a of conversation that occurred nearly one year ago at the home of Geralda Soares in Araçuaí, Brazil. I was to there to help with the FLIP Brazil: Documentary Filmmaking, Human Rights and Global Activism program. Led by Professors Angelica Macklin, Margaret Griesse and Jonathan Warren the program is jointly sponsored by the University of Washington’s Comparative History of Ideas Program, The Latin American Studies Program in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the Master of Communication in Digital Media (MDCM) program.  The FLIP Brazil program is grounded in the work that Jonathan Warren has been doing for over 20 years and is chronicled in his book, “Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil.”

I sat around the table with Ivan, Geralda, Jonathan, Angelica, Margaret, Matthew Franco, and Jaquelina Pinheiro Neiva.  Ivan (Chief of the Pankararú indigenous people of Brazil) was telling the tale of how his people have worked to reclaim their land and are now in the process of re-awakening their canoe traditions.

They live near the nexus of two rivers and were known as canoe people until they were driven from their land around 1850. Upon hearing this story and because I had my laptop ready at hand, I pulled up the movie that I had made with the Hoh River Nation documenting the 2002 canoe paddle to Quinault : “Tribal Journey: Celebrating our Ancestors.”  These tribal journeys are part of a series of inter-tribal cultural exchanges reaffirming and re-awakening the canoe cultures of the Northwest coast. The film portrays the celebration of ancestors through the journey of the canoes; along with the art, dance and songs of the participating tribes; through the preparation and sharing of meals and through the celebration of the potlatch (gift giving ceremony).

Click here to view the embedded video.

After watching the film, the conversation turned when I said, “hey, you should come up to the Northwest and do some deep hanging out through participation in an upcoming paddle.” Ivan then said, “OK, make it happen.” We all looked at each other and said “let’s do it. So with a little help from our friends, we did. Jonathan Warren adds:

“The impetus for the trip had several origins. First, I have always believed that the best way to advance indigenous movements in the Americas is to forge intertribal linkages within and across national boundaries. So for some years I had been hoping to at last link those communities that I have partnered with in Brazil with those in the Puget Sound. Secondly, the Indians in Brazil have always been very anxious to make connections with indigenous communities in the US – I believe for many of the same reasons that I have had, including the belief that such connections will further the indigenous movement in Brazil and elsewhere. So we’ve been searching for ways to make these connections – something that is more difficult than what you might imagine. Thanks to your previous experiences with the NW canoe journey, that sparked the idea of making the connection through that annual ceremony.”

Along with the folks sitting around the table we’d like to thank Suzanne Martin, Carla Simone Barbosa de Brito, Connie McCloud and several members of the Puyallup, Pankararú and Pataxó  communities.  Thanks also go to University of Washington’s Diversity Research Institute, Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity, School of Social Work, Clowes Center, Center for Northwest Studies, and the Master of Communication in Digital Media program for helping to support this encounter.

We also wish to express our deep gratitude for the care that the Puyallup canoe family took in hosting our friends from Brazil.

May the sound of your drums continue to touch the sound-boxes of our souls as the rhythms and ripples of your canoes chart a better humanity for us all.

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Not only was I competing against others right out of college who had degrees people wouldn’t laugh at, but I was competing with others who had been in the workforce for years and had recently been forced to find new jobs because of the recession.

After sending out resumes, cover letters, and continual rejections, I realized that it was time for a new approach. I started to think that if I couldn’t get someone else to hire me I could just hire myself.
Well, it made sense at the time.

I set up Evan West Media, as a a sole proprietorship. I was able to get modest work doing digital media consulting for local bars, restaurants, and even with the City of Everett. I found most of my work through word–of–mouth. Luckily for me I had a fiancé (now wife) with a stable job and health benefits.

Over the last two years my business has been growing…slowly, but growing noenetheless. I have been able to save up some capital (because of the wife with the stable job and health benefits) and I recently decided to expand my business. I have spent the summer working on my business plan, turning my sole proprietorship into an LLC, redesigning my website, and creating new promotional materials.

I have also spent that time defining what I do, and what services Evan West Media LLC offers. In the past I have had trouble trying to explain what I do and what I study in graduate school at the Master of Communication in Digital Media at the University of Washington. I have told people that I do social media marketing, tell a business’ story online, or simply that I just do “web stuff”. What I have found is that the term “online marking” is all encompassing and pretty much defines what I do: creating online videos, optimizing websites for search engine optimization, creating paid search campaigns, and developing digital strategies.

Recently I made one of the scariest business moves I have ever made. I hired someone else to work for me. I am experimenting with Idea2Result, an appointment setting service. They find potential customers and schedule meetings where I can explain how Evan West Media LLC can help enhance sales and customer engagement. It is strange having someone else work for you, but so far our arrangement seems to be working out well.

So far there have been two major takeaways that I would like to share from this experience:  The first is, it may take awhile but it is worth it for you to be able to define what you do in laymen’s terms. For example, most people have no idea what storytelling or “transmedia” mean. Find an easy way to describe what you do. Avoid jargon and empty marketing language.  Help the client define what they want and reflect that back to them along with how you can help them get what they want.

Secondly, It may be scary to take the leap and start your own business, but the risk is worth it. It can be very rewarding to work for yourself, and if you never try, you won’t ever know if you could have succeeded.

I’m hopeful that I will be able to expand my business, but if I can’t, it has been a great learning experience. If I’m not successful, I may have to do something even more terrifying than starting my own business. I may have to get a real job.

Evan West is a graduate student in the MCDM program and will provide FtM readers with regular updates on his entrepreneurial journey.

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At the Great Wall (Badaling Section)

Thousands of people flooded around me. I stared in exasperation at the sign. Yet, I knew that it had to be emblematic of something about my week-long trip to Beijing — my first to China. True to my personality, I had tried to go against the tide by trying to enter the Forbidden City from the less popular north gate. But as of July 2^nd, the sign informed me, visitors to the very much once “forbidden” home of the Emperor of China, had to enter from the south, and leave by the north.

I had been happily using my Garmin GPS watch to track my weekend pedestrian expedition in Beijing.

But the thought of trudging back to the south end, only to end up back where I was presently, and then have to do it all over again to get to the subway seemed like many steps too far.

So what did I do? I skipped visiting the Forbidden City – a treasured UNESCO site – altogether. Rather I content myself with a deep hangout at Beihar Park, and then Tiananmen Square. And I spent all day using stodgy Internet connections through Beijing to download a rental of the Academy Award-winning “The Last Emperor” from iTunes for my return flight to Seattle. Bertolucci’s famed exclusive access to the Forbidden City for his film would have to suffice.

My walk through Beijing

After all, I had accomplished what I had set out to do: to get a glimpse of China for the first time, especially from a digital media perspective. My vehicle in was as a participant in transmitCHINA, where I hobnobbed with entrepreneurial digerati from both the Middle Kingdom and the New World.

Even better, the event was held at a resort by the Great Wall of China. This afforded me two opportunities:

My walk along the Great Wall of China

(1) I got to walk along a secluded, non-touristy part of the Wall. Once again with Garmin GPS breadcrumbs to show off to the folks back home. I was actually surprised to get accurate tracking, I had expected that the signal would somehow get scrambled by the Chinese government.

(2) To experience the Great Firewall of China firsthand. No Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube (some conference participants agreed with my hypothesis that this was partly for political reasons, partly to shelter homegrown Chinese platforms from global competition). Thirty thousand government employees sit and monitor for the use of the “three T’s” – Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen. I even searched “Great Firewall of China” on both Google and Bing and got hung up indefinitely. Once old China hand explained to me that an attempt to access the wrong kind of site would usually result in a “digital slap on the wrist” from the government – no access to the Web for a few minutes, just so you knew you had done wrong.

Still, I was prepared for government blockage, having signed up for a Virtual Private Network (with VyperVPN) before I left the USA. I was able to divert my computer’s internet connection to IP addresses in the USA (Netflix!!), the UK (BBC iPlayer for Torchwood and Doctor Who!) or the EU and Hong Kong to access Facebook and Twitter to my heart’s content. And I found this Wikipedia entry of the Great Firewall, which also includes a concluding, pithy quote from my brother, Dr. Gus Hosein’s colleague at Privacy International, Simon Davies.

Now I thought I was being sneaky and decidedly a bad guest by using the VPN. But then I saw a few other participants (even locals) also had their own VPN access. So I didn’t feel so bad.

Indeed, I’ve read that the Chinese government tends to go in waves when it comes to clamping down on VPN use (it continues to shore up the Great Firewall with the latest in monitoring technology). It recognizes that unless it’s a particularly sensitive time politically, people do need a release valve for pent up frustrations. Better they do so online than in person at Tiananmen Square (there’s a heavy police presence there, by the way).

At Tiananmen Square

I was told on several occasions that they’re actually afraid of Sina Weibo, the Twitter microblog equivalent. There are 195 million microbloggers in China, which dwarfs Twitter’s worldwide user count. And they use platforms like these to complain about government officials, which can sometimes result in a prompt response.

Tracking the transmitChina Weibo stream

During my short time in China, I came across these stories in the local English-language paper that demonstrate the contradictory, sometimes chaotic nature of the use of digital media:

- An official in Henan province was dismissed after his temper tantrum against a school principal was caught on video and distributed online [link].

- A man had complained for two years on his blog about “mistreatment” at the hands of his doctor. [link] He ended up confronting and stabbing the doctor.

- Yao Chen, the “Queen of the Microblogs” has 11 million followers on Weibo. The B-movie actress is the third most popular microblogger in the world after Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. This summer she posted a story about her mother’s cousin who tried to commit suicide because she had received unfair compensation after her land had been requisitioned. [link]

A fairly literal translation of the Chinese saying

China is a 5,000 year-old civilization that presently feels as if it’s the center of the universe, with the money and youthful presence to back it. I suspect this is what Paris might have felt like in the 1920′s, or London in the 1880′s — both major cities at their magnetic peak.

During my time at transmitCHINA, I made some valuable connections with Asia experts from the University of Oregon and the University of Toronto, which may lead to more serious relationships in the region. I also experienced an innovative roundtable approach, the antidote to the dull as doornails panel presentation method that we eschew at Four Peaks.

During one such session, I had the opportunity to define “disruptive innovation” with a small group of people. When I explained that part of this phenomenon is to find opportunity in chaos, Kaiser Kuo, the head of international PR for Chinese search giant Baidu said, “There’s an ancient Chinese expression for that, ‘in chaos, heroes arise.’”

I was quite taken with this, which led me to spend more time chatting with Kaiser. I quickly found out that in addition to his high profile position (his unofficial title he told me was the “Minister of the Suppression of Barbarian Lies”) he was responsible for the rise of heavy metal to China in the 1990’s with his group Tang Dynasty.

Well he had me there, and we soon discovered that we had a mutual, unhealthy love for the group Rush. Wow, China was turning out to be even cooler than I could have imagined it. As Kaiser and I began our bromance, we met for coffee back in Beijing a few days later (after his lunch with Charlene Li, whose books Groundswell and Open Leadership have both been required reading in my class). One thing led to another, and he invited me to attend a show featuring his AC/DC cover band “Dirty Deeds.”

Kaiser Kuo on bass with Dirty Deeds AC/DC tribute band

Around 150 expats (more than 1% of Beijing’s 16 million residents are foreigners) and some Chinese showed up. The bar’s Internet connection was the fastest I had experienced yet in China (which allowed me to download the rest of “The Last Emperor” to my iPad). I was thinking that this was a pretty free-flowing Western experience when one of the band members pointed out that there was a surveillance camera by the bar with a direct connection back to the local police station.

I recalled my tourist experience at the Forbidden City the previous day. Even as China opens its gates, there are still certain immutable realities when it comes to command and control.

I got one last reminder of this upon my departure as I tried to login to the airport wi-fi. I had to scan my passport into a machine (which registered my name and passport number). Out spat a small receipt that read “According to Ministry of Public Order No. 82 Passengers online should authenticate by real name.” As I would soon discover, it was hardly worth the surrender of my personal information; the slower-than-dialup connection got me nowhere fast–which might be the best description of negotiating China’s confusing digital landscape.

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Qwiki has opened its alpha release to the public since January. With its stated objective to “deliver information in a format that’s quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search”, Qwiki has generated great interest, even hyped by media as the “next Google.”

Qwiki turns text based search into a multimedia experience that is similar to combining search results of Google, YouTube and Wikipedia all on the same page. Test drives show Qwiki is more interesting than practical at this point, although it holds great promises in areas that perhaps wasn’t initially intended.

Here are two reasons Qwiki will not replace Google:

• First, Qwiki is indexed to words, not sentences, which is its greatest limitation to replace search. From its inception, it is suited for only a subset of subjects. This is the same way that Wikipedia has been so successful yet never a threat to Google.
• Second, while multimedia is great for those who seek the story, the format severely limits the amount of information presented on the screen. Video and voice is inherently time consuming, they are great for interaction, entertainment, education and illustration. But they are inefficient as carriers of raw information.

Google’s strength is still with the simplicity and efficiency of text, as it can transmit and present the most information on the least screen for the searcher to choose from. Google is not always correct, but it doesn’t need to be. Users provide their own intelligence. Qwiki, on the other hand, attempts to digest and select information, and “tell the story” with sound and video. Therefore it is a much more difficult task to present the “right” information to the audience. For example, the word “Washington” could have different meanings. Qwiki has done a better job with its search prompt feature, which displays multiple items as user types, thus allowing the audience to participate in the selection. As shown, the word “Amazon” brought up a number of different subjects.

Qwiki as a search tool is elementary at best, its multimedia style of presentation is more pretty than it is useful for in-depth information. But Qwiki has its shining places.

It is naturally suited for people and places, as well as entertainment, scientific and educational subjects.

Its social media potential is also promising, as it can be the hub of a particular subject, which extends to conversation between interested parties. Qwiki also said that it will provide a service later this year that allows people to merge their Facebook and LinkedIn data, along with other online content, into a personal “Qwiki”.

Qwiki has almost instant commercial value due to its word based categorization. For example, companies will use Qwiki as a great PR outlet, cities can promote tourism, and new film launches will find its multimedia format a natural fit.

Qwiki is not the future of search, but it may be among the new contenders in online media to watch for.

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