With the goal of supporting the knowledge circulation and creation process in a society, we have studied story-based communication in a network community. On the basis of this research motivation, this paper proposes a web-based multimedia environment called Stream-oriented Public Opinion Channel (SPOC), which enables novice users to embody a story as multimedia content and distribute it on the Internet. The system produces digital camera work for graphics and video clips and automatically generates agent animations according to linguistic information in a text. The findings of our evaluation experiments show that SPOC is easy for novice users to learn and use, suggesting that this system can reduce a user's cost in creating multimedia content and encourage communication in a network community. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.