The Tools Aren't The Story

By Jon Udell

May 24, 2001

(Telling A Story :  Page 3 of 3 )

In this Article

Telling A Story The Uses Of Storytelling The Tools Aren't The Story

Because I am a technologist, and work with other technologists, I tend to believe that problems -- like the information chaos that surrounds knowledge workers -- will succumb to the right mixture of tools and technologies. If only it were easier for most people to create topical websites, reorganize and filter messages, create and use metadata, manage time-ordered streams of information, and so on. It's always about the tools and technologies. Except that, really, it isn't.

Mainly what matters is telling the story. Bloggers, WYSIWYG HTML editors, and content-management systems can make the job much easier, just as software tools for publishing, video, and music can make those jobs easier. But the truth is that these tools are optional. It all boils down to just three things: a storyteller, an audience, and a venue.

Tale Of A Project WeblogFor knowledge workers in cyberspace, as I've said, the venue consists of a messaging medium (e-mail) and a publishing medium (the readable Web). At the intersection of these two media there is a niche for a storyteller to occupy. The story that needs telling is a project weblog. Here's a sanitized picture of what I mean.

Here's what's happening in this project weblog:

• Time line. In the weblog tradition, recent items appear at the top, and older ones rotate out to archive pages.

• Commentary. Entries on the time line refer to, and comment on, landmark documents.

• Categorized items. The time line generates narrative flow, but it doesn't categorize items along other important dimensions which are, at the moment, hot issues to resolve, and agreements on how to resolve them. So, these appear in their own columns, and expand on the teasers that appear in the time line.
  
  

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