Dillon Deliberating

What is Storify? it is a tool that allows you to curate content from the web? They make is so easy that curating can sometimes be mildly addictive. Even better the content you curate and publish can then be embedded onto your webpage or blog. Additionally Storify has the characteristics of a social network in the sense that you can follow other users of Storify but this is not its strong point. The follow feature is merely the cultural heritage of Twitter that lives on in Storify.

You might have guessed it I am enthused by Storify a tool that has recently go into open Beta and has gone on to gaining a certain amount of traction with journalists who like spies love to gather up information and present it to an audiences big and very small. Though not a journalist I like to curate information and present it back to an audience, so Storify has got my curation juices flowing. So why bother?  Well this is what I got out of Storify so far:

A new source of content for a website I run: This page on the London Strollers website is indebted to Storify and brings together the greatest London walks from Mike Biggs a Ramblers walk Guru. Curating and embedding this content took me fifteen minutes. While Storify does not negate the use of a CMS to create web content it is actually a enjoyable, not a word readily associated with CMS’s

Provided content other than my blog posts to put out: for example tonight I followed #RSANye a discussion about the Future of Soft Power whilst I followed the tweets I also curated some content around the talk. Later I published and tweeted it out, will it get an audience? perhaps not but I have a source of information to refer back to about this brilliant talk.

Stephen Hale,Head of Digital at the Department of Health bemoaned the fact that “content management systems are often a barrier to doing great digital communication” well Storify is not a barrier but a great opportunity to doing digital. So how could Storify work for your organisation?

- Use Storify to curate great content from around your web presence including tweets, videos, pictures and articles then glue them together on Storify, add your own stamp then Tweet or Facebook it to remind people about what they missed.

- Curate your organisations best blog posts on Storify then publish and distribute.

- Training, why not curate great examples or otherwise from your web presence on Storify and send it around to your colleagues as representing good or bad examples they could emulate or avoid. Maybe that perfectly formed Tweet if such a thing exists.

- Having a Twitter Q & A well curate the questions and answers and publish on Storify. Think of these as the highlights of your Twitter Q & A for those who might have missed it. Check this out for a more in depth view on how this can be achieved.

- Or you might want to do a spot of curating on Storify, keep it in draft for reference or indeed screenshot the preview and send it around.

So far so good but Storify has some issues but these can be overcome:

- You are limited as to how much you can customise what you embed on your website. Though your developer can work on overcoming this problem and their is a work around here .

- Storify does not appear to have a search function so you can find great stories already curated. Sometimes Storify reminds me of Slideshare of course if you can embed Slideshare on your site then why not Storify content?

- The audience is niche but if you like or have to deal with journalists they might appreciate some curated content you send to them.

Of course  a risk exists in respect of embedding content from Storify on your website, if Storify went down this might affect what you have embedded. Though the same could be said when you embed a video from YouTube.  

A good example of Storify in action can be found on Al-Jazeera and it shows how it can be integrated onto a website.

Of course Storify is not the only curation kid on the block take a look at Curated.by or Scoop.it  I have not played with these tools but would be good to get your feedback on Storify and curation in general. This from Multi Media Journalism was useful in terms of an introduction to curation