With the amount of news available online, aggregation and curation are becoming increasingly important for finding, filtering and managing information. Of course news no longer emanates solely from traditional media sources or even from blogs. Much of it now comes from social streams as well, and oftentimes the news, analysis, and reactions via sites like Twitter are stories unto themselves.
That’s created a lot of opportunities for new sorts of digital storytelling, and one of the tools that the writers here at ReadWriteWeb have had in their toolbox is Storify. The website opens to public beta today.
Storify allows users to pull together information from social media – tweets, videos, photos, links – and build stories that include both content and commentary. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping the items from your Twitter timeline, from Flickr, from YouTube, from RSS feeds into the story-builder. You can also add your own text to the story.
When you’re done, you have an easily embeddable story. You can also opt to notify the people whose tweets you’ve included.
Curation, Journalism, and Storify
With Storify opening to the public, we will undoubtedly see a whole new set of stories curated here. But during its beta, it was journalists who found the site to be particularly useful. NPR’s Andy Carvin, for example, renowned for his curation of Twitter during the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, has storified several news events, including the assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords.
Carvin told The New York Times that he realized that the reaction to the Gifford shooting was a story itself. “It quickly evolved into looking at how people were discussing the media coverage surrounding it and its potential political impact,” he said. “There’s a big need for tools that allow people to collect bits of social media context and organize them in some fashion.”
With Storify launching its public beta today, it looks like people will have a new tool at their disposal to do just this.
See Andy Carvin and Emily Bell in The Revolution(s) Will Be Curated at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit, June 13-14 in New York City.
