If you’ve given a presentation lately, you’ve probably spent some time digging through stock photography websites to dress up your words. Presentation Zen counsels that images should largely replace words due to the picture superiority effect, and increasingly in presentations these days, they do.

This makes sense in our current age of inattention and info-overload, where we’re often reminded that short-term memory holds only 7 chunks of information, and these fade from your brain in 20 seconds. If this is really the case, however,  it’s worth questioning whether slides of orange slices and sunsets are as effective as we think at reinforcing our ideas. A few problems with the stock photo approach include:

#1: Inauthenticity

Projecting an authentic voice is an essential component of social media success. People have turned away from advertisements and corporate messaging and toward personal perspectives, user reviews, and other signs of human life online. Stock photos don’t show the world through your eyes, and are hard to distinguish from ads.

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What do a cheese monger with Asperger’s syndrome, a globetrotting photographer and an author experimenting with acupuncture have in common? They’re all great characters whose individual stories can tell us a lot about our world.

That was the premise of Advanced Multimedia Storytelling: People and Story, the course I co-taught with Sarah Stuteville this past quarter; that a short film focused on an individual character’s experience is an extremely effective means to communicate a message, whether it’s about a product, a service or a broader trend in society.

The eight students in the class produced some powerful work, and sometimes got more than they bargained for:

Erika Takeuchi set out to produce a lighthearted profile of guide dog trainers, but when she met a trainer named Joseph Skillings, things took a turn for the serious. Joseph suffered severe head trauma a few years ago after trying to help a women being harassed at a bus stop. He took up puppy training as a way to deal with the lasting impacts of his accident.

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“Video games will be the fastest-growing and most exciting form of mass media over the coming decade” declares the headline to The Economist’s recent video games special report “All the world’s a game.”

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a consulting firm, the global video-game market was worth around $56 billion last year. That is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry, nearly a quarter more than the magazine business and about three-fifths the size of the film industry, counting DVD sales as well as box-office receipts (see chart below). PwC predicts that video games will be the fastest-growing form of media over the next few years, with sales rising to $82 billion by 2015.

I don’t love video games. I’m not good at them. But I’m so enthralled by Raiders of the Lost Ark-like cinematic experience of games such as Uncharted: Drake’s Deception that I’ll play them on “Easy” just to get to the next reveal. It’s also why I’m more wedded to the PS3 console, because of story-centric exclusives such as Uncharted, and the just-announced I Am Legend-inspired horror-apocalypse game, The Last of Us (trailer below).

I’ll temper my excitement about The Last of Us (due in late 2012, early 2013) until I hear whether it’s in 3D or not. Yup, you heard me. I didn’t think much of the blockbuster Avatar — as a movie, or as a 3D experience. I’ve resisted the urge to get a 3D TV because the glasses strike me as anti-social, unhealthy for young children, and hardly worth the investment especially with companies like Toshiba developing 3D technology that doesn’t require eyeware.  But when it comes to interactive cinematic entertainment such as Uncharted (and now Batman Arkham City, which I’ve just started), I’ve discovered that 3D makes the story experience that much immersive. It’s akin to introducing home theater 5.1 surround sound into the home after a lifetime of mono television. It helps that Sony just released an accessibly-priced 24″ 3D monitor that works for both PS3 and Xbox (already reduced to $399 — glasses, game and HDMI cable included – $299 this week at Best Buy for American residents).
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On June 9, 2011 I did something I didn’t expect to do a few years earlier: I officially graduated from the University of Washington with a Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) degree. The reason I didn’t expect to do it is because of how I thought of myself and what I thought I was capable of, up to that point in time.

Off the top, though, I have a huge number of people to thank for “holding me up” when I was ready to fall and for joining me on the journey.  The two primary people I want to thank are my spouse and partner, Carol, and Hanson Hosein, director of the MCDM program (pictured here handing me my diploma). My journey would have been impossible without them. Read more…

The Seattle Refugee Youth Project is premiering digital stories created by local refugee youth on Saturday, March 5 from 1:00-3:00 in UW’s Kane Hall 120.  To accompany this blog post they granted Flip the Media a sneak preview of one of the stories:

My career in journalism started just as newspaper publishers began their awkward and ultimately impotent dance with Internet. As a photojournalist, I watched publishers and editors struggle with how to fit the paper’s Internet presence into their business model.

At the time, the notion of citizen journalists and crowd-sourcing stories would have seemed absurd. The journalist’s role was that of a gatekeeper who filtered what the audience needed to know from the noise. Read more…

Last week, a new “information experience” startup – Qwiki – received a fair amount of publicity after closing it’s first round of funding totaling $8 million and announcing some upcoming features.

Qwiki provides rich media to consumers by scrubbing the web for content and assembling it into a short presentation with narration. Users can suggest content, but unlike Wikipedia, users can not actually edit the presentations.

Qwiki was first demoed last September at TechCrunch Disrupt where it was selected as the top disruptive technology (keynote). Recently, several large news outlets including ABC’s Good Morning America discussed whether or not Qwiki will be able to “flip” Google. With a new round funding and several internet moguls at their side including a co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin and Jawed Karim, a co-founder of YouTube, it appears there’s nothing stopping them.

On Friday, MediaPost reported that later this year Qwiki will provide a service that allows people to merge their Facebook and LinkedIn data, along with other online content, into a nice little “Qwiki”.

I was a bit skeptical about Qwiki’s ability to auto-magically tell my story but after watching Robert Scoble’s Qwiki, I think this could be a possibility.

What are your thoughts?
Will you tell your story with a Qwiki?
Will you tell your client’s stories with a Qwiki?

Transmedia Storytelling and Net Neutrality were the topics of the night last Tuesday at the MDCM’s first ever Four Peaks public salon. The salon started with a live broadcast of MediaSpaceTV featuring an interview between MCDM director Hanson Hosein and Brent Friedman, CEO of Electric Farm Entertainment. Transmedia Storytelling, an interactive and multi-platform storytelling method, is according to Friedman, a way of exploring “additional tributaries,” and selecting tools from a “digital sandbox.”

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After new media turned the old-media world upside down, a couple of digital hipsters tilted their heads and gave analog a second look.

Ben Terrett and Russell Davies, of the European design firm Really Interesting Group (RIG), spoke this month in Boston at the Razorfish agency’s client summit. They were discussing their venture, Newspaper Club.

Their goal is to move “past digital infatuation and analog nostalgia” and into “the post-digital world.” They want us to recall the power of physical contact with tangible things, and to use the right tools for the right purposes. A friend had aggregated various readings from the Web into a book titled “Things I Would Rather Read on Paper.” The RIG boys saw this and realized computer screens are a “really terrible way to read,” and books and newspapers are “a fantastic technology for reading.” Read more…