Social Reading & Writing - Storify

This week we looked at a number of things in the workshop, including Twitter and IFTTT, but the thing that I most enjoyed was the website Storify.



For those of you who haven't used Storify before, it is a fairly new social media site (available for public use since 2011) that allows you to create stories or timelines by bringing together a number of different pages and forms of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook.
The site is very interesting as it allows you to link to a number of different sites/artefacts in your story, for example to individual Tweets or Facebook statuses, or to a specific article or blog.
I linked my Storify account to my Twitter account in order to share stories easily.

Users can share their created stories with other members of Storify, as well as on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, or by email.

I really like how the site allows you to bring together lots of different pages and elements that would usually be separate, all in one place. I found Storify fairly easy to use and navigate, and I really like the idea behind it. In my opinion it is quite empowering, allowing you to create and publish informative pieces with direct links to numerous different sources.

I made a story myself, click on the burger to see it (and yes, it is about Krispy Kreme cheese burgers, believe it or not...)

There are lots of interesting stories on Storify, and you can browse by categories such as News, Government and Brands.
If you haven't already, it's definitely worth checking out...

This related to the seminar this week which was on Social Reading and Writing, as we discussed the decline of books and print, and looked at the consequences that this was having. We explored a new term, 'hyperreading', which is a screen-based, computer assisted form of reading, which could also be thought of as speed reading or skim reading.

Storify could be considered as participating in this new form of reading, as it encourages the reading and processing of lots of different pieces of information at once.
Although I can see a danger in hyperreading, in that it could be thought to kill concentration levels, I still think that Storify is a great programme and could be used to great effects.