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"Senior year at any high school across this country is a major transitional period; a period in which students reaffirm their community ties while, at the same time, they prepare to separate from that community. Hurricane Katrina prematurely forced this transition and moment of separation on thousands of seniors throughout New Orleans ... Y06 allows the students themselves to acknowledge exile while transcending it as they explore these transitions online together, while giving the rest of us a unique way of understanding the personal impact of the New Orleans disaster."

That's the logic behind the Yearbook 2006 storytelling project, a unique multimedia package that shares stories, pictures, diary entries, audio, and video from the New Orleans tragedy--all seen through the eyes of high school students.

Josh Goldblum is a digital storytelling wizard who founded the design firm, Blue Cadet Interactive. He shaped the Yearbook 2006 project from the ground up.

Goldblum is our special guest this week, teaching us the fine art of interactive storytelling in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
While describing your Yearbook 2006 project, you wrote: "However, we felt we would need to deliver these photographs in some novel way to differentiate our story from the preponderance of audio slideshows developed by such news organizations as NYTimes.com and WashingtonPost.com." What did you mean by this?

Josh Goldblum:
Well first off I hope I wasn’t being too harsh a critic of the audio slideshow. Continue reading...

I think some of these programs, especially slideshowpro and soundslides are really fantastic for rapid production and are great at what they do. They can be a real lifesaver for groups that don’t have the time, expertise or budget to deliver their content in a more custom fashion.

This said the ease of use and affordability of these programs makes them fairly ubiquitous and while they have some great features they are limited in the type of storytelling they allow.

Also, while the content can certainly distinguish an audio slideshow, the form is fairly common. They are like blogs in that way, the content is key but the form is generally pretty standard.