I've been thinking for a couple of years how the ideal creation framework could look like. Of course it depends on the type of creation. In my case, I would like to combine and interweave:

  • Drawings and paintings representing places, events, characters
  • Music, for various places or contexts
  • Texts and poems, describing places, stories, feelings
  • Cooking recipes, technology descriptions

The main building material would be the drawings, forming full-pages of visual environment. On these drawings there would be some URL links. Some would lead to other connected pages (moving to a nearby area, zooming into a particular region, zooming-out to the upper level), while some others would link to content, such as music or recipes, open in popup windows.

In practice, the universe creation would very simple:

  1. Upload a full-page drawing.
  2. Write a text narrative besides it.
  3. Put tags on it like in facebook, with URL linking to content (mp3, pdf, etc.) or to other pages.

The advantage of such framework is to aggregate the creative content into an interconnected system, that can grow organically from any of its parts! The visitor becomes an explorer who somehow interacts with the universe by choosing where to go and what to look at. It is inspired by the RPG-adventure video game style (Zelda, Final Fantasy, etc.).

Ideally, the framework would also feature comment threads on each page to let the visitors give feedback.

Now, comparing to what is available: Facebook allows to easily upload pictures and very intuitively place tags on it, but only to identify peoples. If those tags could contain any URL, that would do it! But no... DotClear allows pages in WHTML format with comments, but the width seems limited to the blog page, and placing the tag on the picture would be difficult...

Any other software suggestions to enable this creative boom? Thanks!