One Tool Short of Fifty

I am done. I cannot do any more tools. I have now completed the 49th version of my Dominoe Story in 49 different web creation tools. Actually, there are 7 tools left in the trash bin that were buggy or just not worth the time.

What started out as a half-thought idea in July grew into a stupidly monstrous task, but you know how it goes, set a goal, blog it, and …. This is for my 50 Web 2,0 Ways to Tell a Story workshop that gets its first test run a week from Monday in Hobart, Tasmania I have an access list of the 50 tools, links to my and other examples, and a summary of the 49 versions of my single story with notes on each tool.

I have some cleanup, typo checks, and the last piece is I want to write a summary and a list of my favorite tools. The problem is that many of them are blurring together in my mind. To be blogged soon.

But a few things that are noteworthy:

At least 2/3 of these tools I had never heard of, and now I am convinced there are more, many more out there. Is this good? A number of them are rather similar, but I am jazzed at the variety. Heck, I have a drawer in my shed with about 50 screw drivers, so why not?
36 of the 49 tools offered embed code- cut and paste code to put the media into other web pages. This is astounding! I call this the YouTubization, since YT broke this ground (perhaps not the first, and I’ve been using the tag since the mid 1990s with shockwave), but it changed the mindset that said, you want to force people to go to media sites to view media– the embedding allows you to re-purpose content in other places, might one even say to make content “reusable”, the old learning objects desire?
A good number of tools offered integration with other web sites via APIs- whether to fetch media from flickr, YouTube, PhotoBucket, Facebook or to publish easily to blogs, MySpace, Facebook. This is more small pieces joined kind of stuff.

I will have to say, the last one I tried, WebSlides is novel and has great potential. It allows you to create web-based slideshows frrom bookmarks- either imported ones, or ones you can generate with their browser tool — or it supposedly can suck them in via RSS (need to check if that is dynamic or not). So you can convert a set of marked pages into a quick slide show, overlay with audio. It makes for possibly a quick way to do web demos– the best thing is these are not screen captures of web pages, the slide show includes cached copies of the real deal.

Just for grins, I used WebSlides to do a show of my 50 Dominoe stories
http://slides.diigo.com/list/cogdog/dominoe

This has been incredible fun, but man am I sick of this story!