February 5, 2006
The There There
The Organic City is an Oakland-based site for collaborative storytelling, rooted in a common environment. It’s a project of Seamus Byrne and Sarah Mattern at Cal State East Bay, and it just launched, less than a month ago.
In concept and basic workings, the site is similar to Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, which takes New York and its cityscape, and which Scott discussed in his recent DAC presentation. Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is an innovative project that has amassed many writers, but that site is about six years old and, in some ways, seems unpleasantly old-school in its interface and its workings. The Organic City project features a story map that looks and works well; there are even plans for mobile access. (Registration is required to add stories, no doubt because the potential for story-spam has been wisely foreseen.) The mobile media page links to several other related projects, too.
May 4th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
Please check out our storytours section!
I just wanted to announce that The Organic City (www.theorganiccity.com) team has now entered Phase 3 of our development, where a user can download other users tours, filter them by author, genre or location and take them “to go” on their mobile device (currently Pocket PC and iPod) and reexperience the story outdoors.
They can also begin to construct their own Story Tour of Oakland.
There are three types of tours:
Featured Tours: Which are recommended tours by the organic city planning team
Author Tours: Experience another users story tour
Genre Tours: Experience a tour of media pieces from the same genre
It opens lots of possibilities for non-linear stories and very distributed storytelling.
Please check it out… http://www.theorganiccity.com/wordpress/tours_types/
Usability recommendations are welcomed seamus@theorganiccity.com
Cheers,
Seamus
PS: We are a Webby Nominee in the Student category, if you feel like voting for our site:
http://peoplesvoice.webbyawards.com/login.mhtml