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meograph

Meograph redesigns their application with a fresh new look

We’ve talked about Meograph a variety of times over the past few years. They have an excellent tool that combines Google Earth with storytelling, and it can be a great way to supplement a story with geographic context.

The design of the site has always been solid, but their latest refresh really makes it much better. The new design is much more visual, intuitive, and mobile friendly in an effort to make consumer content creation for brands even easier.

Meograph refresh

There aren’t any new features with this release, but we felt that the refresh alone was worth mentioning since so many of you use the tool. Look for some new features from them later this year, and go try out the new interface at meograph.com.

Create your own 2013 Zeitgeist using Meograph

Each year, Google releases their “Zeitgeist“, a summary of the “what captured the world’s attention in the past year”.  This year, Google is working with PBS to offer you the opportunity to create your own Zeitgeist for 2013 using the Meograph storytelling tool.

Here is a sample video using stories from 2012:

The contest winner will receive a Nexus 7 tablet from Google, and will be featured on YouTube’s education channel and Google’s Google+ page.  Entries must be submitted by midnight on December 14.

For more, check out the press release from PBS Newshour, or get started on the PBS #MyZeitgeist page.  If you create a compelling entry, please share it with us by using the comment section below.

Meograph launches interactive storytelling

We’ve mentioned Meograph and their “four-dimensional storytelling” a few times on the site, and they’re back again with more great features.

Today they’re announcing (PDF) the release of their interactive storytelling feature, bringing live Facebook profiles directly into multimedia content. From their release:

Now Facebook friend tagging is deeply integrated into Meograph’s creation and playback experience. In addition to creating stories out of video, audio, photos, text, and links, Meographers can add visual, clickable tags of Facebook friends. No other multimedia creation platform offers this type of engaging, socially viral product.

With this capability, organizations and their storytellers are able to incorporate live visual links to social profiles embedded right within their stories. The tagged friend is notified and gets a Facebook wall post that links to the story, an image from the content, and a list of the other people tagged. Letting people know they are part of a story being told massively increases virality of the content. This is timely as the age-old art of true, lasting storytelling adapts to the digital, social era.

meograph

It looks to be a smart new feature for the site, as the meographs created by users are typically social in nature, so connecting it with Facebook should be a great move.  If you’ve not used their service before, head over to Meograph.com and give it a shot.

The latest updates from Meograph

Our favorite “four-dimensional storytelling” site Meograph just posted a few great new updates:

  • Social photos: Import Facebook, Instagram, Flickr images (and do web image search) right within Meograph.
  • Improved design: Just got a whole lot more elegant, making stories look awesome.  Much easier on the eyes 🙂
  • Video preview: Check out video clips without having to leave editing

Here is a Meograph that takes advantage of some of the newest features:

You can try it out for yourself at Meograph.com. Have you created any cool stories on their site? Share your links to them in the comments below.

Meograph adds search features

We’ve been fans of Meograph since we first showed them you nearly a year ago.  In that time they’ve made a wealth of improvements, and the latest update is another great feature — search.

meograph-search

Users have created over 40,000 stories on their system, and now they have a good way to find the ones they’re looking for.  The search features include:

Meoscore: Scoring system that automatically ranks stories by quality/completeness, using number of moments, percent narrated, media included, etc.

Deep search: Because Meographs are saved as datasets on the backend, we can discover search terms in every subelement of the story in a way that no other media can.

Organization: Ability to sort by relevance, popularity, and recentness.

You can access this new feature at meograph.com/search.  If you’ve created an interesting meograph using their site, post a link to it in the comments so we can check it out!