After being blown away by Scott McLoud on TED with his fantastic presentation on comics, I was inspired by his ideas about the benefits of digital comics where you don’t have the break at the end of each line of pictures like in a regular comic book, but you can literally continue the storyline so that you can create parallel stories, circular stories, etc. Just watch his presentation on TED so you know what I am talking about.
I absolutely believe in the power of storytelling. And after hearing Scott, I thought: why not take it a step further: collaborative storytelling! Would it be possible to create some sort of online community where people can collaborate on telling a single (endless?) story by contributing parts of the story. You can compare it with pieces of a puzzle, where everybody adds another piece. Also, Scott inspired me about parallel stories and circular stories, so I imagine that online story collaborators can also add join-points to the story in order to have multiple story lines, multiple endings and multiple beginnings. The story line itself should be visually represented so that users can easily navigate the story, and add their piece of the story. You might even reuse parts of the story, or rate each others story parts so that you can become the ultimate story collaboration champion of the world! (wouldn’t that be nice 
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Pieces of the story could be a mixture of movies, written stories, pictures, sounds, or you could have stories for each media type: a video story, a text story, and so on. And perhaps, some automated process can generate random story lines on demand. Maybe collaborative storytelling is suitable for multiple contexts, for instance in education, just for fun online, or businesses perhaps.
What are your ideas about collaborative storytelling? Do you think it is possible? Would you consider it fun to contribute? Is it feasible? Do you know of any existing online story collaboration communities?
