Lewis DVorkin of Forbes is excited about Storify, a new service that makes it easy for journalists and others to search, grab and assemble content snippets from the Cloud.
Storify’s co-founder, Xavier Damman, says, “Smartphones and social networks are turning everyone into a reporter. But we are not all journalists. A journalist is an information engineer. Someone who gathers as many sources as possible and extracts the signal out of the noise to produce a story. It’s about moving information from the people who have it to the people who need it.”
I signed up for Storify today and tested it out. It reminds me of Tumblr, in that you can seamlessly “borrow” from other sources, but with Storify one pulls from multiple sources, instead of just one. Which is why it appeals to journalists and bloggers. But does the company have a bigger market to serve?
Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb thinks so. “Social media curation has grown up and is becoming a first class citizen of the open Web, just like blogging.”
“A poster-child for the era was
theglobe.com, which was one of the “world’s leading online
communities with over 2 million members in the United States and
abroad” (according to the prospectus). The site personalized
users’ experiences by allowing them to publish their “own content
and interacting with others having similar interests.”
From that last link….sounds way too
familiar. Have things changed?