24 December 2013

Digital Stories

People love reading from newspapers, to comics, to autobiographies, to bestselling fictions. Writing and reading are often related and come hand in hand. However, publishing business is a very competitive industry where authors have an extremely difficult time getting themselves a publisher especially if they are only just starting out. Also, ordinarily publishing has become a very sexist sort of affair where by its very nature female authors stand a greater chance of being accepted for offers by publishers. However, writing for newspapers in form of journalism has also become competitive as companies strive to keep readerships on a daily basis and rely on advertising for revenue generation. Perhaps, the world of publishing needs to start embracing the digital world a bit more and seek more opportunities to enhance their user base as well as to unlock some of their valuable content. One noteworthy approach to increasing immediate feedback from users is to utilize a collaborative story platform. Produce stories where people could collaborative and become part of the process. The transitions can be automated for correctness using a storyteller intelligence. Even a process to add recommendations for what to write about, where to end a chapter, where to end a book, what plot lines and climaxes juxtapose well together. It could even take form of allowing people to create their own comics, build their own autobiographies, fictions, and even to collaborate in a crowd sourcing manner for news. Imagine collaborating with many to develop a mysterious island story and sharing the rights as well as royalties from sales. Inspirational ideas could even be used from the Project Gutenberg which contains free access to classics and provide content for general reading. There could even be options on personal content for monetization via publishing rights, subscriptions, and advertising. Publishing can then become a cheaper option as well as something accessible to all. The books can be made available electronically in multiple formats. Feedback can be provided by readers at every iteration of the book in an agile fashion. Even semantic web can be applied to the process to distribute a graph of story links. News stories could be created by freelance journalists who could sell them to publishing newspapers with freedom from limitations and available to the highest bidder. Stories often take many shapes and forms as well as offer a context to which content can be applied. The dexterity of stories can be engineered by almost anyone that shared an interest in an area or enthusiasm for knowledge. We have social networking for games and even music. However, there could also be a lot of untapped potential in social networking for stories.