Good storytellers can make a single story relevant to many different situations. She can allow a single story to take on several different meanings based on its context—the people listening, the other stories told, even the time of year. A good storyteller has a chronological, topical, and associative matrix that allows her to pull various pieces of story together into one tapestry. The reason this is so compelling is because as stand alone items, stories are just pieces of information. But information doesn’t become knowledge until we contextualize it and internalize it. The more context a content piece has, the more “hooks” it has for us to grab onto and associate into knowledge. A reader can find information on a website on his own. But lacking his own associative matrix of our content, he might not be able to form a three dimensional understanding of our content. If we provide him tours through the content—predefined themes that link content in non-traditional or unexpected ways—we can help him integrate our content with his own experiences, turning information into knowledge.

Go for it. Are the "personas" identified beforehand? I've been working on a science education site, and am taking an approach that resonates. feel it is helping with "bridges between points of view; and "doorways" into new approaches, identifying themes that can be developed beyond where they typically end - or die out. Christian

Yes, though what I'd really like to do is play around with the personas a little. Turn them on their heads. Instead of thinking about our personas in very traditional ways, what happens if we flesh out their individual idiosyncracies--the "warts", as we call them. How might our narrative change if our persona is not merely a science teacher, but a science teacher who skydives and plays in a rock band? How does such an idea get us to think differently about the narratives we want to create? How does it change the way we think about "related content", for example?