First Fruits of Geo-stories
Journalism.co.uk reports on a BBC project called Geo-stories that gave students GPS-enabled phones along with still cameras, audio recorders and video tools and sent them out to create news stories. The project was a collaboration between the BBC, University of Brighton, Nokia and Ymogen, a mobile marketing firm and aims to explore a new type of citizen journalism/story telling. The results are what I’d call animated slide shows, linked to Google Maps that include audio produced by photography students at the university. The one I watched was on Guerilla Gardening. (You need to click the “play story” button under the map to launch the story.)
The topic was fine, the images ok, but the format didn’t work for me. Each image had a “headline” but nothing more. The music was pleasant background but added little. Most disconcerting though, from a geographic standpoint, the movement of the background map from place to place in London, didn’t provide me, as one who doesn’t know that area of London with much context. That’s because the map in the video used only imagery. The page for the story uses just the street map and you can click on icons to see the images. I do like that you can “experience” the story in two ways - passively via the “play” button and actively, by clicking on the icons on a static map and reading the author’s “blurb” about their topic.
