Releasing the inner child, storyboarding and knowledge management

I went to the excellent Anecdote blog and saw a comment from one of their commentators Daryl. He had recently had a chat with the CEO at plasq.com regarding using their product Comic Life.

I started to use Comic life as a means of storyboarding initially to help a friend out with something for his kids. However, I did initially start to play with it as a means of playing to develop some KM concepts and possible product developments on a personal basis. I did this fairly secretly for fear of ridicule at my place of work who would not seen it as 'work'. Also as a Apple Mac user - I thought that it would be difficult to transfer over to a Windows centric (though on closer investigation I was wrong.

All is not lost though for windows users - plasq are developing a version for Windows which is currently in beta. Another beta that people may want to have a look at Skitch which looks useful in sharing images and can do it via Flickr.

I wasn't totally convinced with using comic life but towards the end of last year a company called Zengobi did a give away I picked up a copy of Curio basic which takes up storyboarding a bit more though it appears to be Mac only. This version enhanced my abilities to do more complex story boarding which I found of more use and more flexible

Can I recommend that you have a look at Zengobi and have a look at Curio especially the Pro Version as this may extend the concept for you. This is particularly relevant as they have recently upgraded to V4 which I am testing out on a 60 day trial version before deciding to upgrade.

But what if I don't have a computer - I hear you say

Another option that I have used is the storyboarding option from the Moleskine diaries as a handy carry around for me to use covering mind maps etc and the use of a trusty pencil and then inking it in or transferring the concept over to Curio.

I've always found that if you can encourage people to play and use computers as a means of liberating that, then people can use it for how they overcam a particular problem or use it to show some best practice on the production line.

Maybe I will go back to comic life and use it in a full blown presentation one day......

PS - it is amazing what happens with synchronicity and whilst I was thinking about cognitive biases and went to wikipedia to find out about it - so had Anecdote the day before - so to avoid any problems, I'll give them a hat tip on this one as well. If you are in knowledge management and haven't looked at their blog you are missing out on some great nuggets relating to KM.