Curating the Real-Time Web with Storify

Marla Shaivitz Mar 12, 2011 Tweet

Turning what people post on social media into compelling stories – that is the stated goal of Storify, a site that aims to aid the efforts of journalists and bloggers to curate the real-time web.

Burt Herman is the founder of Storify. A self-described entrepreneurial journalist, he spent 12 years covering stories around the world for the Associated Press. After completing a Knight journalism fellowship at Stanford, he took the startup plunge and joined up with Xavier Damman, an engineer who founded a crowdsourced magazine in his home country of Belgium.

“We help people find meaning in the noise of social media. By creating a platform to find the best content, people can get the story of what’s happening on social media without having to sift through thousands of Tweets, photos and everything else.”

The site boosts a simple and easy user interface – journalists and bloggers drag and drop elements such as Tweets, photos and videos and other media from social networks to add context and organization to a subject. The complete ‘story’ is then easily published and embedded across different services such as WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous or Mailchimp– and if necessary, easily updated from the platform and pushed to everywhere the story has been embedded.

Social pingback is utilized to build communities around stories. When a story is published Storify asks if the author would like to notify the people who have been quoted with an @ mention helping create an instant audience and helping to build engagement.

The site is still in Beta, so you’ll need to request an invite; if you’re going to be at SXSW, check out Storify at Tech Cocktail’s  SXSW Accelerator Kickoff on Sunday!