Storify is announcing a contest to find the best story of 2011. The team has pulled together 10 nominees, but all Storify posts are eligible to win. Users can vote by clicking the Storify ‘Like’ button at the top of each story. You can like as many as you want, but you can only like each story once. The story with the most likes by December 29 wins Story Of The Year, and the author wins an iPad 2.
The Story Of The Year page will keep a running tally, and the top 10 authors will all receive Storify t-shirts. After liking a story, you’ll be prompted to tweet about the contest. By promoting the contest on Twitter, anyone can enter into a drawing for another iPad 2. Make sure to include the hashtag, #storifyoftheyear. “This year, stories have often unfolded first on social media,” says Storify co-founder Xavier Damman. “We can’t wait to see which story moved people the most.”
Storify is the social Web news site starring you. It provides powerful but simple curation tools to pull together moments from around the Web, including tweets, Facebook posts and YouTube videos as well as images or links. Posted stories become standalone webpages, which Storify curates on its front page, and they can also be embedded anywhere. See our post about Storify’s 10 most quoted tweets of the year for for an example.
Storify can be used to capture funny, everyday moments, like our breaking Twitter story of a Gmail outage. But it has also been used to report on some of the biggest news stories of the year, enabling even mainstream media organizations to cover fast-developing events, like the Occupy Wall Street protests, in unprecedented ways.
Storify’s nominees include documentation of police brutality and journalist arrests at Occupy protests, an overall timeline of the many uprisings of 2011, and the story of journalist Mona Eltahawy’s capture and beating by Egyptian law enforcement.
There are also some sillier moments, like a Storify tracking the saga of Sean Power’s stolen laptop and the live-tweeting of a Burger King breakup.
Visit the 2011 Story Of The Year Storify page to see all the official nominees and the contest rules. Remember, you can vote for any story by clicking the ‘Like’ button, not just the ones nominated.
If you’re interested in learning to use Storify, check out our how-to post for some ideas.
