Tell Me Your Stories

With the help of my tech savvy friends, I discovered Storify. Storify is a website that allows you to create "social stories." Their website explains it better than I ever could: "Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative. We are building the story layer above social networks, to amplify the voices that matter and create a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social."

So what does this mean for us? Storify is a great way to use different forms of social media (including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr) to see what people are talking about along with any images they have of that topic. After you choose which comments, tweets, images, etc. you would like to include in your story, Storify lets you add text to connect everything. You can use Storify to learn more about anything from politics to music. On the Storify homepage they have featured topics, which are things people are talking about, and today's featured topics are: Santorum Quits, Facebook buys Instagram, Weather and Baseball. As you can see, Storify really can be used for a wide range of topics! 

 To play around with Storify, I made a story about Friday the 13th. Storify is super easy to use-- when you go to www.storify.com one of the first options is to take a guided tour of the website, which is what I did. After you decide what you would like to write your story about, Storify brings you to the story pad, which allows you to use social media to search your topic. 

I wrote my story about Friday the 13th, which was a good way to learn how to use the site, but probably not the best use of Storify. I mostly found tweets and Facebook posts from people I didn't know lamenting about having either bad or good luck today or the fact that today is also National Kiss Day-- nothing too exciting. My advice would be to create a story about something directly relevant in your life, for example one of my friends made a Storify after Lehigh beat Duke that was full of great tweets and pictures posted by Lehigh students, or about a controversial topic (such as politics) so you can get a wide range of views. Storify is a great, easy to use tool that I highly recommend to curious people like myself. 

Here's how I made my Storify: 

1. Go to www.storify.com 

2. Select "Create Story" which will give you a guided tour of the site if it's your first time using it 

3. Choose a topic and title for your story 

4. Use the story pad to search your topic in different forms of social media 

Here I am searching Twitter for tweets about Friday the 13th

5. Drag the tweets, comments, images, videos, etc that you would like to use in your story into your story (Drag from the right side of the screen to the left) 

6. Add text to connect everything 

7. Publish your story! You can choose to tweet or Facebook your story if you would like. After you publish your story you can still go back and edit it. 

Check out my Storify about Friday the 13th! Did you know that there are three Friday the 13ths in 2012 and they are all 13 weeks apart? SPOOKY! 

So, tell me your stories!