Interactive Narratives

"Try your hand at closing California's budget shortfall, estimated at $24 billion. It's not easy, but it can be done. Cut spending, raise taxes and/or borrow to get the state out of the red. For each choice -- drawn from proposals from across the political spectrum -- we've tried to give some sense of the effects. As you craft your proposal, the Deficit Meter will show your progress."

"The abandoned houses project began innocently enough roughly ten years ago. I actually began photographing abandonment in Detroit in the mid 90's as a creative outlet, and as a way of satisfying my curiosity with the state of my home town. I had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence."

Our First Loves is a multimedia storytelling experiment. Produced by a group of student journalists in an interactive design class at the Medill School of Journalism, it is based on the idea that journalism on the Internet should be about connectivity. Not just hyperlinks or social networking, but connectivity in the sense that it has the unique ability to bring even perfect strangers together and show us what we have in common. New media journalism can be the ultimate equalizer, a proof of the human condition.

If all these people who know so much about journalism on the web spent less time on waving their arms in hysterics and actually built something -- created value, or tried a new model instead of opined on one -- the world would be a very different place.

"There are worlds for socializing, worlds for gaming, even worlds for e-learning. But one thing that most virtual worlds have in common is that they are places for play, not practicality. Outside of some reports that virtual worlds will replace web conferencing in the enterprise, we haven't seen a lot of innovation in this space which would make businesses sit up and take notice. However, that may be about to change thanks to new software that lets you perform data visualization and manipulation techniques within the virtual world environment."

"Today's consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for information, but until recently making sense of all of that raw data was too daunting for most. Enter the new "visual scientists" who are turning bits and bytes of data -- once purely the domain of mathematicians and coders -- into stories for our digital age."