Friday May 14, 2010

The Arab Bank: Reloaded

The Cannes Film Festival has swung around again, so I thought I’d revive “The Arab Bank,” my Google Maps-based serial from last year. I’ve tweaked it a little bit, removing the Street View scenes from the story itself so the whole thing loads faster and more readily from the tokens on the map. People I know in advertising tell me that if you think of something, you’d better do it immediately, since somebody else is surely thinking of it. I’m certain mine is not the first story to use Google Maps in this way, but—sure enough—the most famous current example, Dinty W. Moore’s “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge,” appeared last June, just a month after “The Arab Bank.” Zeitgeists, evidently, are real.

If you’re interested in how this story came about, I did an interview about it with Small Stories shortly after it appeared and later blogged about my trips to Cannes as a trade journalist that inspired the story. The story itself is also included in my 2009 e-book collection Cassingle.