Storify: Making Stories From The Social Web
February 03 2011, 09:59 AM
Filed in: Indie Advice
Every time I see a new social media tool, utility, service, app or website I just have to try it out. You never know which one's going to be the next big thing and you can't really trust all of the hype, reviews and press releases that flood the blogs. So whenever I see one that catches my eye I immediately sign up, dive in, and just try things out for myself.
This approach has led to some pretty spectacular tools in my social media arsenal. There are tools I can't live without such as Evernote and Instapaper, and then there's great Twitter management tools like Tweepi, Klout, and Twitter Grader, and of course there's always a plethora of new music sites which offer great potential, with my most recent favourite being Viinyl.
I was on a popular news site not too long ago when I noticed this really slick interface that showcased all of the conversations that were happening on Twitter on a certain topic. My initial thought was, wow... someone spent a lot of time searching for tweets and styling them with CSS code to present them in this tidy and clean little news stream. But then I noticed that it wasn't a custom piece of code, the stream was provided by a new startup called Storify.
Storify? This is how the company describe themselves:
"Making stories from the social Web, finding moments to remember in the real-time stream. Building the future of journalism, helping journalists, bloggers and experts find the best tweets, photos and videos from from the social Web to make simple, beautiful stories."
Storify isn't a music tool. It's not a social networking site.
It's a tool for bloggers to convey discussions and stories that appear across social media sites. And yes, there are definitely uses for this for artists and musicians as well.
For example, do you have a decent following on Twitter? Are they engaged and converse with you frequently? Do they post comments, pictures, and mini-reviews of your music and gigs on Twitter? If so, you can collect these social media conversations and display them on your band's blog very simply, just as I have done below.
Storify isn't available publicly yet, but if you sign up as Beta User you'll be notified as soon as they're ready for new users. So i you're a frequent blogger, make sure you check them out.
Ok, enough chit-chat. Here's my first example of a Storify feed:
