A couple of months ago I included augmented and virtual reality in Top3ics, my occasional newsletter, adding “Consider these as first notes towards a future post.” I then forgot about it. Thanks, Newt Gingrich!

Vox wants to move beyond the web page to tell compelling stories... That Clinton package was the first public product of the Vox Storytelling Studio... launching on the premise of hypercharging the concept of the story, using all resources available to transform the story into a experiential entity... publications and media companies must continue…

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

Some 63% of marketers plan to increase their native advertising budgets this year... The Times launched its "T Brand Studio".. in 2014... has created more than 100 campaigns for more than 50 brands.. generated around $35.7 million. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed, which only sells native ads, generated revenue of $100 million in 2014, while Media Week estima…

Pluto-focused project, upcoming episodic series, and experiments with “meditative VR,” The Times is experimenting with different applications for the new technology... The idea is to do proper VR shows that have a through-line and episodic structure... We’re looking at an experience that we jokingly call “meditative VR.” These are single-shot, no…

But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences... although every one of these environments was fake, the experiences I had in them were genuine... you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.…

Over the last six months we’ve been collaborating with The Atlantic to bring three interactive articles to life... We set out to create an immersive, yet thoughtful reading experience and I’d like to share some of our insights that helped get us there... live site here: http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/athenahealth/.. we decided to build an …

Cultivating an authentic, trustworthy and compelling narrative is vital to a leader’s success. This course helps leaders find their own story through personal branding; develop storytelling success with all constituencies; initiate an effective voice for crisis; interact well through social and third party media; and communicate a vision for in…

The 12-person unit, called the social stories team, includes a variety of roles: writers, animators, graphics professionals, and producers, who create and package content for Instagram, Vine, Tumblr and Snapchat Discover.

Coda’s mission is to “stay on the story” after mainstream media leaves a crisis region... We pick crises that are consequential and complex, and that can’t be understood through sporadic flashes of attention... the site won’t be trying to keep up with breaking news...watch things unfurl at the pace of evolving trends rather than daily development…

2015 MARKED PROPUBLICA’S most ambitious year to date in visual and interactive storytelling...here are some highlights from the year that was.

Google Spotlight Stories is a new form of storytelling made specifically for mobile and VR. In these 360-degree, interactive stories, your phone becomes a window to a world all around you. The sensors on your phone allow the story to be interactive; when you move your phone to various scenes, you are able to unlock mini-stories within the story.

We are a growing community of tens of thousands of creators with tens of millions of readers. Among us are world-class publications like The Daily Dot and The California Sunday Magazine, professionals, educators, and people with stories or ideas worth shaping. We believe digital storytelling is a craft. The ability to design and share your idea yo…

While the platform has long been a bastion of visual storytelling, it has also been historically lax with its limitations on gratuitous writing and hashtagging. That all changed today... An epidemic of hashtag fatigue is coming... The first step was de-prioritizing the hashtag in discovery feeds. The next step is burying it in yours... To e…

the Instagram experience, with its constant flow of images and text boxes, presented an alternative story geometry that demanded from me new things. Shorter stories... a deeper consideration of photographs and the rich, nuanced ways that words and pictures work together. ... a powerful, unexpected, and mostly underutilized storytelling tool...…

focusing less on how audiences interact with content on the screen but more about how, because of stories, we engage with each other as a community. Less transaction, more relation; less on audience, more on community... in 2003 I launched the initial version of Interactive Narratives ... Finding inspiring multimedia work was one benefit. But f…

Racontr is an easy tool to create and diffuse interactive content online

“moments” are mini news digests of tweets across a range of topics... with splashy full-screen photos and videos. Each individual moment is made up of about 10 tweets... allows users to follow stories they’re interested in for a limited period of time... clearly targeted at curious or casual users... a “catch-me-up” type of news digest, using t…

Storytelling at its finest... should evoke a visceral reaction in its audience. There's something to be said about inviting that audience to participate in a story ...the options for how to do so are infinite... Here, we explore some great examples of interactive and crowd-sourced storytelling at its finest. - Crowd-sourced storytelling: How…

In this class, we uncover the narrative structures and strategies used by social change practitioners and entrepreneurs for building community and inspiring action... a workshop for makers and social entrepreneurs ... storytelling to transform themselves, their teams, and their broader communities. - Transformative Storytelling — Foossa Files …

- How They Did It: Part II — Medium

A bunch of useful tools for telling stories, with examples. - How They Did It — Part I — Medium

"... the “picture superiority effect,” whereby concepts presented with visuals or pictures are better learned and more easily and frequently recalled ... including an image with your social media posts delivers 180 percent more engagement or 150 percent more retweets,,, adding a visual element increases retention of the content to 65 percent" …

"Humans are emotional creatures and they want experiences that engage them as humans. They're not eyeballs, impressions, views, likes, shares, clickthroughs, or conversions.... connect people through sharing and conversation to form communities that we can then cultivate. That takes understanding, purpose, intent and genuineness.

Every brand, every company, and every person has a story to tell, and visual storytelling is a very effective way of sharing your brand’s message and engaging with your customers. - The Science of Storytelling Through Facebook Images

"People bond. Barriers dissolve. Connections are made. Trust increases. Knowledge is transmitted. Wisdom is shared ... a deep sense of interdependence is felt... If you are part of an organization, no matter what it's shape or size, it's time for some meaning making ... by creating engaging opportunities for everyone, from mail room to board ro…

"Fold is a platform for telling stories. It makes it simple to add multimedia background information or create context... the main story reads as all stories do, straight down vertically. But contextual information is placed to the side of the main story, on a horizontal line. That information can be video, photos, or links to other sites..."…

Great "best of times, worst of times" piece on storytelling. Not just worth a read, it's worth learning the formula. An example: "Our access to knowledge and stories has never been greater, and it’s growing every day.... "21 things only a 90s kid can appreciate” will probably get 50 times more traffic than a post about climate change or political…