Will post a photo of the place as soon as I can.

Among the many different kinds of screens found in community-driven Web applications, two screens in particular define how content creators stay engaged and contributing: social objects and dashboards. …For a community-driven site like YouTube, the social object is the video. For a community-driven site like Flickr, it is the photo…

…The object needs to presented appropriately and framed with lightweight actions that allow people to share, curate, and discuss. These actions allow consumers of the application’s content to quickly and easily provide feedback to the application’s content creators. This feedback encourages creators to share more content assets and the cycle continues…

Working through the design of the social object page forces you to first define what that object is for your application and second understand how your users need to interact with that object.

Nina Simon also wrote a whole chapter on Social Objects in Museums, which puts a cultural hertiage spin on things.

Losing 80% of your screen space forces you to focus. You need to make sure that what stays on the screen is the most important set of features for your customers and your business. There simply isn’t room for any interface debris or content of questionable value. You need to know what matters most. In order to do that you need to really know your customers and your business. Which is good design 101. Designing for mobile forces you to get there -like it or not.

Luke Wroblewski: Mobile First Helps with Big Issues

Our starting point is “The Opera House.” as a building with a lot of interesting history. Any suggestions for interesting buildings to add would be greatly appreciated. At the moment, you’re able to crudely submit more posts by email.

• The name, Torokiki, is a Maori verb meaning: ‘to sprout afresh, re-emerge, re-establish, reappear’. (When we’re being familiar, we might just call it Toro, which on its own means: ‘to visit, stretch forth, stretch out, extend, survey, reconnoitre’.)
• The team includes Alex Herdman – @alexsaru, Cj Wells – @clarionjulie, James Everett – @jamese, Jem Yoshioka – @jemshed, Miranda Kaye – @BubbleUp, Rob Ramsay – @robramsaynz, Sam Minnée – @sminnee and Timothy Greig – @taonga.

Quests: Carefully curated quests make sure player behaviour is focused and measurable. The small number of goals that make up each quest encourage players to visit locations in the city to create image, video, audio, and text ‘responses’ along set themes. Players create content in response to a controlled number of historical images, chosen from a larger pool just for a particular goal.

Players can develop their profiles as they earn points and badges through completing these quests. Where quests have been developed around local events, these badges can lead to tangible prizes!

Email Magic: Players submit most content while out and about using email. The game keeps track of the quests that players submit under, and wider community reaction.

Team Adventures: The game is primarily designed for people to play together in small groups at specific events. There’s a quest curation system which allows us to design new quests and assemble new sets of content around our chosen theme.

Key moments: Here are a couple of examples of ‘moments’ that might drive the spirit of the game.

• Visiting a historic site in Wellington, with an original photo in hand, and being able to experience all the new stories people have created in response to that original.
• Sharing a really special story of your own, or the story of someone you know (maybe a grandparent) about what that location means to them.

Environmental Scan: These are projects that we’ve noticed which are similar in spirit to Torokiki.

• Croydon Then & Now – a personal flash project which reveals historical images over top of modern ones.
• History Pin - Attach pictures (from Picasa) to locations on Google Maps/Street View. Users can write stories about any pinned image. Created by Google and We Are What We Do.
• Make History - A 9/11 memorial project which collects stories, videos, and photos from witnesses of the attacks. (By Local Projects.)
• SepiaTown - Pins historical images to Google Maps locations. See also the SepiaTown blog.
• Street Museum - Museum of London project, uses iPhone’s location to display images from the Museum of London collection relative to the user. This review of Street Museum walks through how the app works.
• Tales of the City - Part of London’s Festival of Architecture (19 June to 4 July 2010). Buildings were labelled with QR codes and people were invited to add their stories about the buildings.
• Timescope - A viewfinder/binocular installation in Berlin which overlays historical images on the modern city for the viewer.

Hugh Pickens writes “The TV series ‘Lost’ involves a large cast of characters marooned on a tropical island after a plane crash, with episodes that thread lengthy flashbacks of characters’ backstories with immediate plots of day-to-day survival and interpersonal relationships, and a larger ‘mythos’ involving the strange and apparently supernatural (or science-fictional) happenings on the island. Independent scholar Amelia Beamer writes that the series works as an example of a recent cultural creation: that of the hypertext narrative. ‘In Lost, the connections between characters form the essential hypertext content, which is emphasized by the structure of flashbacks that give the viewer privileged information about characters,’ writes Beamer. ‘Paramount are the connections unfolding between characters, ranging from mundane, apparently coincidental meetings in the airport, to more unlikely and in-depth meetings, reaching back through their entire lives and the lives of their families.’ Beamer writes that the series also pays tribute to video games, another relatively recent interactive means of storytelling.”

Hadyn made the suggestion the other day that during Midnight Note there was more an illusion of interactivity. Players thought their actions (e.g. giving Sam instructions on where to investigate) were impacting the story, but really they weren’t – or at least we were heavily structuring the way they were involved, only responding to suggestions that suited his purposes.

In DWS we instead required quite focused, task-based interaction from players to unlock each step of the story. In the end, when this didn’t come, we had to get Beth to do the tasks that players wouldn’t/couldn’t do.

I guess the topics I’m really interested in feedback about are:

• How did we do at guessing how people would respond? What was good/bad?
• How should we react when things don’t go as predicted? Attempt to always bring things back on track, or let the story explore a new direction?
• How much interaction should we have asked players for?
• How did the medium (flickr vs twitter vs something else entirely) impact interactivity?
• How did players’ day-to-day life impact their willingness, and what could we learn about working around this?

You can post these as kick-off topics, or just throw them into the comments below this post.

So! I’ve had this idea for a webcomic/story thing for a very long time, and I keep putting off. Some of you might know about it, The Otherwalls. At the moment

The Otherwalls is a world made up of abandoned stories. All stories that have been never told have ended up here. Characters become lost and have to find their own way in this new world.

I’ve written it as a bit of an epic, but I’m not sure whether that will work too well with the way I’m updating (not at all). I’ve got 12+ characters, all of whom have pretty involved story lines. I’ve got around 60,000 words (thanks, Nanowrimo!), but most of it I think I’ll end up abandoning, since it’s started drifting away from my original concept.

I want to do something a bit different with it than standard comic fare. I’ve been reading Spera, and I like the way it’s quite a different kind of storytelling with lots of different artists contributing. Eventually I’d like to get other artists and writers to contribute – especially folks from among you fine bunch!

Pretty much I want to work on an establishing chapter, that sets up the world and a few key characters, and then begin pulling the threads that people find interesting, or that I do. I think this works better in smaller, easily producible chunks. I talk about telling stories with one picture, so perhaps I should be looking to be much briefer in this than I’ve originally thought. I love the simplicity of the story in Spera, and how it’s the beauty and individuality of each artists interpretation of the characters and environment that really give it life. I’d like to apply similar practices to Otherwalls.

I also want to have most of the process quite open. I’d like to be getting feedback on it every step of the way. I’d not be revealing plot points until the published pages, but releasing thumbnail and development sketches while I’m working on it.

So! That’s a beginning of discussing my project. I think that if I start discussing it it’ll be more likely I’ll start working on it again, too!

Any thoughts/comments appreciated. I’ll try and clear it up some more when I’m thinking more straight-headed about it.

You can start new ‘blog post’ topics, or even just ‘quickly share something’ as a status update, quote, or link.