INLSA
A screen grab of the Storify social media storage application.
Kyle Venktess and Suren Naidoo
EVER wondered what happened to those news-breaking tweets that delivered us the death of Michael Jackson? Or those that trended when Muammar Gaddafi and Osama bin Laden were killed?
Here is the solution to the problem of losing that valuable and historic information on the endless strings that make up the web… Storify.
Wikipedia says “Storify” means “to form or tell stories”.
The Storify website helps its users tell stories by gathering various images, tweets, Facebook updates and videos found on the internet that pertain to specific campaigns or current affairs.
Storify has a built-in search engine to browse videos, pictures, updates on Facebook, Twitter and various other social networks. Simply sign up to use the website or use Twitter credentials.
Users can then easily create a campaign and drag and drop items from the search results into a new story or campaign page. The different elements selected for the story or campaign can then be reordered to the user’s desire.
The aim of the site is to gather content of specific events and store them on the site. The idea is that normally during important events in the world, tweets, videos and social media updates get “lost” on the web.
Storify provides a platform for gathering this information and storing it online. The Storify application is becoming a popular “social media aggregator” used by journalists and major international newspapers such as The New Zealand Herald, The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
According to an article on editorsweblog, an online publication of the World Editors Forum, social media sites have become commonplace as sources for professional journalists, as regular people are often the first to witness and document significant events.
“Such material can be valuable in, for example, providing context for a news story,” reported editorsweblog. “However, finding and collecting the relevant material, as well as using it to create an effective story, can be difficult.
“Storify was created to address this problem. The website is designed to make it easy for journalists and others to sift through content on social media sites and publish the most relevant information.
“Storify’s users are able to pull in content from different social media sites and create story streams. Users can also embed these streams on their own sites.”
The Mercury takes COP17 to Storify
The Mercury is yet again ahead of the pack in terms of social media and technology innovation in the South African newspaper industry.
The Mercury is taking advantage of Durban’s hosting of the COP17 climate-change talks to launch its presence on Storify.
Jon Knight, acting editor of The Mercury, said COP17 presented an ideal opportunity for KwaZulu-Natal’s leading morning newspaper to experiment with Storify, a social media storage facility.
“In addition to our extensive coverage of COP17 in print and on our website, our team will gather the most popular tweets, YouTube videos and Facebook and web updates on one convenient and easy-to-view page on Storify,” he said.
The Mercury’s Storify campaign for the climate-change meeting|has gone live and will be updated daily with happenings from the conference.
The campaign has videos, images and other information gathered from social media platforms relating to COP17.
Once the conference has ended the information will be stored on the site for future reference.
Accessing Storify through the Internet Explorer browser can be slow, with the site not loading all its elements or giving a limited view of Storify.
For a more convenient and user-friendly view, visit the Storify site using a Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox web browser.
The Mercury’s Storify COP17 campaign can be found at:
http://www.storify.com/The MercurySA
