When I’ve written a post with a list of mobile storytelling applications, I had a chance to take a closer look at Blurb Mobile. When I opened it for the first time a couple of days earlier, it looked a bit complicated, but when you give it a second chance, it’ll reveal all the possibilities and open your imagination as to how future digital storytelling will look like.
The most prominent part of Blurb is that it prompts you to think of a story as a sequence. You can upload up to eight elements at once and this is immediately making you think of the order, the structure, the plot.
Now, a fantastic thing is that those eight frames to fill don’t have to be of the same kind. You can add not only images, but also audio and video. You can place them in one story. This is revolutionary.
So far we had single-form stories. We read books, watched films and listened to radio. We also have multimedia stories, like enhanced e-books. In all of them, a prevailing form is known upfront.
Blurb is different and I realized that only because of looking at such a simple task – eight frames waiting to be filled with the story. Those frames are equal and sequenced.
A piece of music after a picture of a beautiful girl is a different piece of story than a picture of a beautiful girl and a picture of a piano.
When you sit down with iMovie, you are going to make a video. When you take Blurb Mobile, the imagination works differently. There is absolutely no need to think of eight images or eight videos or eight audio tracks. Once you drop the usual thinking, you allow yourself a to bring a completely new, fresh, unexpected dynamics to a story.
Writer Updated 
Hello from Blurb Mobile,
We really appreciated reading your post. You clearly understand what the app is about…and are ‘spot on’ as we say in the US.
The app is still new and we are very interested in how people are thinking about the act of sequencing their media. Personally, I find myself carefully considering each image, video, text and audio…placement. I travel a bit and can pass 3 to 4 hours straight on a plane moving images and videos around to create stories. It also enables me to understand what I am missing… what will complete the story…or, how I should have seen / photographed something.
The app can obviously be super fast to use / communicate….but, for some people…I think the fact that it will challenge them to “think” about what makes a compelling story….will be a factor in the app’s adoption.
We have some very interesting things coming in the next 2 – 6 weeks. Will ping you when the updates roll out.
Thanks again !
Jim & The Blurb Team
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Hi, Jim, you did a great job with the application. On a surface it
looked a bit complicated and this is probably the biggest challenge – to tell digital storytellers that they’ve got an extremely powerful but
very easy app at hand.
Wow, I imagine what fantastic stories Instagram users could create with Blurb Mobile. They just need to know about it.
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Hi Piotr,
Blurb Moble released an update today which allows social sharing of stories through the Story Stream, and optimized for the iPad.
Enjoy, Claire (Blurb Mobile designer)
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Hi Piotr,
Blurb Moble released an update today which allows social sharing of stories through the Story Stream, and optimized for the iPad.
Enjoy, Claire (Blurb Mobile designer)
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