Hack Text

Brick-and-mortar bookstores have a future. It’s mobile.

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Borders’ bankruptcy is being seen as a victory for e-books and the beginning of the end for brick-and-mortar booksellers, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s how to build a better bookstore.

Five things the success of Facebook chat tells us about the future.

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Facebook chat has quietly conquered everyone else running chat software, almost without trying. Why did Facebook succeed at beating out dedicated services that had been in the game longer and had dedicated platforms? These days most of my chatting goes on via Facebook chat with a small minority […]

Building structures inside of your story [Narrative Artifacts: 2 of 4]

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Sometimes it is valuable to have something inside of a story that both the characters and participants can manipulate. Building an artifact that intersects with your main narrative thread is more common than you might think and very useful. The first narrative artifact-type I’d like to deal with are narrative-centric artifacts. These are narrative fragments that are internal to […]

Why the Kindle is my Swiss Army knife

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In a world of digital doubt, the Kindle keeps me always keeps me always prepared.

What is a text and how do I hack it?

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It has been a long time since my first introduction to this site. A lot has changed, including the name, my purpose and my topics. I guess it’s time to explain why the site is called HackText and what the point of all this is. When the blog started, I didn’t understand that the word I […]

Artifacts: building dimension into your narrative [Narrative Artifacts: 1 of 4]

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In print, your narrative thread may be enough to sustain a reader, but when you go beyond a single book, it’s time to consider the other ways your story can engage. Narrative artifacts allow you to build dimension into the universe of your story and are universally applicable. From journalism to video games, artifacts may be the key to pulling in and keeping your audience.

Narrative artifacts are the things that surround and add to universe of your narrative. In many ways they are one of the most important elements of a transmedia experience.

There are three types of artifacts: narrative-centric, narrative-parallel and narrative-additive.

Crowd-sourced television goes to the next level with Bar Karma and Storymaker

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Current’s newest TV show, Bar Karma, is an evolution in storytelling. The show is a platform for community contributions, ideas and amplified cooperation. The creators leverage contributions, recommendations, pitches and votes through a platform created by video-game great Will Wright. The project is powered by a tool called Storymaker, which would be very useful to journalists, video game developers and narrative […]

Huffington Post and AOL: 5 things to take away

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AOL has announced that it will acquire the Huffington Post and place Arianna Huffington as AOL’s editor in chief. What does this mean for the media, the future of content creation and the internet at large?

Learn your culture, remix culture

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If you haven’t been watching Kirby Ferguson’s excellent Everything is a Remix videos, here’s a quick collection and some links to the excellent documentary. We often talk about remixed media as if it were something new to our culture. However, in these extremely informative videos Ferguson traces the modern remix back to 1961.