Tim O’Reilly posted a wonderful video interview with Kathy Sierra on her approach to creating passionate users, shown at the Tools of Change (TOC) for Publishing conference. If you’ve never heard of Kathy Sierra, you should definately go watch the video – I guarantee you’ll learn something. And if you have heard of her, why are you still reading this?

I’m the first to admit I’m a huge fan of Kathy Sierra and her inspirational insight on creating passionate users. Like so many others, I was deeply saddened when she announced, for very legitimate reasons, that she felt the need to stop blogging. I’ve learned a lot from Kathys writings, so it’s great to see her back in action again.

Most of what she has to say in the interview has been covered in previous posts to her blog, however during the video Kathy refers to a book I hadn’t heard of before, Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder, and discusses the value of stories and storyboarding techniques used in screenwriting to create compelling content.

This storyboarding approach sounded very similar to a presentation planning technique described in a book I own, Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson, whose technique I’ve used to produce a couple of presentation to date with great success. The possibility that the same approach might be applicable to other types of content sounds almost too good to be true.

Needless to say my copy is already on order.