My Family Album Scribr

MYSCRIBR LETS ME DISTILL my family's digital lifestream into a book that I am already writing. Add a plastic sleeve for the multimedia elements and I have compelling sitting room transmedia.

I've been stuck into lifeblogging since I discovered my Nokia 9210 could fire a blog post directly up to my Typepad blog in 2003. Then I realised I could use Zonetag to automatically push every image shot with my Nokia 9210i to Flickr in 2004. Two years late, I watched my Nokia 9500 perform magic as it let me produce 25 frame per second video for uploading to YouTube. Its Nokia E90 baby brother did live video with Qik and also made Audioboos that I shared. But a problem emerged with all this content. It was dispersed but not collected. That's where Scribr comes in handy.

Scribr can listen to all your watering holes and then create a printed journal of the result. It's automated. You can add private annotations. And if you spend the time to configure everything, you can produce a bound edition of the consolidated digital lifestream of everyone in your family.

For me, the ultimate value of social networking lies in its narrative. Every individual has a unique story to tell and some of those stories come from the heart. We go to different events, learn new things, convert data into knowledge, and overcome hardship. In effect, we're all news sources with content worth sharing. If you don't believe that, then you haven't seen the good side of online social networking.

My daily lifestream is littered behind me in several different formats. I have precious audio clips from pre-school children that fold into conversations with my 80-something mom. She plays them on CD because it's hard to hear them during a phone call. I generated 80 GB of images and video clips on my phones in 2011. Since I'm recording most clips at 720p as our little boy tries to walk, I'll have more than 100 GB in 2012. Some of those key frames deserve to survive the test of time--but they need a paper index so people looking at the little terabyte drives know what lies inside. I want the paper index to be a Scribr product with a DVD enclosed inside.

Our lifestreams are fleeting unless we put them into multiple content vehicles. So my blog posts become newsfeeds that push onto Google Plus for comments and onto Twitter for retweeting. Parts of my photostreams end up in the favorites of others and a half dozen of my images every year become hero shots for brochures or promotions. Two or three every year get licensed by Getty. I keep the best snippets of text in Evernote and the best imagery in a working folder monitored by Crashplan where they are close to hand when I have to revise presentations or produce white papers. This has become a process for me as I try to become a new media storyteller.

In past years, I would have been happy to let my different digital elements finish their journeys in specific destinations, tailored for different audiences. Some content would just sit on my blog as part of its long tail. Some reports and short video clips would complement industry events along with Slideshare files. Portions of my stuff would go public via the Audioboo, Flickr, Instagram, PicPlz, or YouTube apps. I manually put some stuff on Facebook and LinkedIn. I also push some content out into the local news channels as press releases. While no one format can play to each of these destinations, all of these formats can be placed into different vehicles and be driven to different audiences.

I want family and friends who live an ocean away to talk about what we're doing here in Ireland and I want to sit around the kitchen table to discuss what my extended family is saying eight time zones away. These family conversations happen with stories to tell. I know from experience (using photobooks I've printed from Spectra.ie) that the conversations (i.e., unexpected phone calls or Facetime sessions) are energised with the ambient intimacy that we enjoy inside our private social networking zones. The same thing will happen when our entire lifestreams are reduced to paper because the paper creates a context and the context can spark a conversation.

Scribr will get me started but I'm under no illusion about achieving a conversation metric. If I truly want an unexpected joyful phone call, I have to offer a truly transmedia product. The Scribr book has to have a CD photo slideshow or a DVD of short clips. The book alone is meant to provide fragments of content displayed along a timeline that provides a context for what has been harvested in multimedia.

I've started the adventure. Along the way, I'm gathering stories from family members that I would have never heard before. And I know I'll be rewarded by conversations that will light up the wires in a few month's time.

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innovation