Community Guy - Latest Comments in Social Media Challenge: Telling a life story

Re: Social Media Challenge: Telling a life story

Alex — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:57:14 -0000

What a great idea, Jake! I'm jumping in here with another idea, drawn from our community on Scrapblog. Many people have done what you've described by scanning their photos and creating digital stories with them using our service. For instance, here's a nice example:
http://www.scrapblog.com/vi...

Scrapblog works with the major photosharing sites and you can easily bring in your photos from them (you may also upload them directly to Scrapblog). These include Flickr, Photobucket, Webshots, Smugmug, Facebook, Picasa. You may also bring in your videos from YouTube.

Since you're using Flickr, if you give a unique tag to the photos, then your family members on Scrapblog can search for that tag and import those photos for use in their online scrapbooks.

One of the advantages to using Scrapblog is that you're not obliged to use premade templates. In other words, you are free to compose and create in any way you like, starting from a blank canvas and using our simple to use editing tools. We also offer hundreds of professionally designed themes, stickers, backgrounds, patterns and fonts that you can use to embellish your scrapblog and tell your story.

When you're done creating your scrapblog, you may share your slideshow with friends and family through email, you may post it to your blog, you may display it in your social networks and you may download it locally for printing. Soon, we will offer a printing service as well so you may order photobooks.

For more on telling stories through Scrapblog, see these blog posts:
http://blog.scrapblog.com/c...
http://blog.scrapblog.com/t...

Good luck with your project and please let me know if you have questions or suggestions!

Thanks,
-Alex
Community Guy, Scrapblog.com

Re: Social Media Challenge: Telling a life story

Dan Perry — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:58:51 -0000

I'd suggest myfamily.com. It offers a ton of options for keeping in touch. Adding a soundbite to an image or a video, keeping track of birthdays/anniversary's, etc. Definitely worth a look.

Re: Social Media Challenge: Telling a life story

christopher carfi — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:02:54 -0000

jake, have you seen the work that's been done over the past decade or so by the Shoah Foundation?

http://college.usc.edu/vhi/

it's a fantastic resource on capturing, cataloging and archiving personal testimonies.

Re: Social Media Challenge: Telling a life story

Connie Bensen — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:59:42 -0000

This is the specialty of our niche - memory keeping.
I have created two heritage books & both were huge projects. It's definitely worth it though!

There are a number of options ranging from print, video, etc to choose from. No matter what you decide make sure that the jounaling is committed so that the stories are retained for future generations!

Re: Social Media Challenge: Telling a life story

Chris Brogan... — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:46:09 -0000

The majority of people who you want to touch in this project WON'T be web types. They'll be Muggles. For that, you'll want simple tools to gather stories, and then use funner-er-er tools to make the stories into something more interactive feeling.

How about setting up some calls on Blog Talk Radio to do "around the campfire" storytelling in general, especially if you can spark the conversation with a few pictures as starters?

How about doing a few face to face video recordings of some people flipping through the pictures to gather their reactions to mix into the footage?

Mail out one or two Flip video cameras with quick instructions on how to use it, get some relatives to record bits of their thoughts on her, and mail them back.

Get some relatives to read out parts of the recipes into a mic and play the audio against a panning (not scanned) camera shot of the recipe.

Go to http://archive.org and find Creative Commons licensed songs to match the period and to fit the mood.

Do some face to face interviews with the younger generation holding pictures and trying to describe what they think she's doing in the pictures.

Then, blend it all up with iMovie (that's all you need), and spit it onto the web, onto a DVD, and into archive.org for future generations to view as a record of a great lady's life.

Re: Social Media Challenge: Telling a life story

Abdul Salaam — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:42:09 -0000

Jake, what a great way to remember Grandma Pat and share memories with her community. Check out Panraven.com, a site that integrates sound and text with images and enables you to show online and offline.

Re: Social Media Challenge: Telling a life story

Chris Heuer — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:15:22 -0000

For doing the scanning and digitizing, I met the CEO of iMemories when he did a presentation at Social Media Club and they do a great job for a great price. http://imemories.com/

For the telling of the story, I got to hang out with Alan Levine, from New Media Consortium who has this great resource, 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story http://cogdogroo.wikispaces...

Re: Social Media Challenge: Telling a life story

Yang-May — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:13:42 -0000

What a wonderful project, Jake, that will honour your Grandma's memory while bringing the whole family together. My extended family has been using Yahoo Groups to keep in touch from all over the world and they've been talking about collecting a book of recipes but my cousin is still trying to work out the best way to do it - a hard copy book? a blog? etc.

Dandelife looks good and being on the web means that members of your family can contribute whereever they are. Being an old fashioned kind myself, I think a hard copy book could also be nice - there's nothing like an object to give a sense of heritage. Lulu.com or similar offers publishing services.