organic city story map

this is, quite simply, the coolest map I've seen in a long time. The geniuses at theOrganic City website are promoting the community of Oakland, California, by collecting and preserving its stories online. These stories are fiction and non-fiction, personal and historical, serious and fun, and pretty much anything else you can think of that relates to Oakland. The stories are also in a variety of forms: text, sound clips of songs and storytelling, and video.

The map you see above is one way to navigate through the storybase. It directs you to the stories fixed in the landscape. The group of blue squares you see to the lower left are points of interest in Oakland Chinatown-raised journalist Bill Wong's video walking tour of Chinatown. The smaller group of blue squares to the upper right are stories performed by storyteller Patricia Bullit. The yellow triangles are sound clips and the red dots are text.

The site also helps you download these clips to your iPod or mobile phone, so you can listen or read or watch as you walk. As yet, a lot of the stories are just reminiscences, or some rather silly art product of the sort that gets a lot of play in the Bay Area. But it's a brilliant idea, and once it gets some traction---and the assistance of more artists, writers, and storytellers---it'll be a brilliant site.