If I could present and show you a simple way that you can design and share amazing stories over Internet, would you be interested?
Storytelling, as the art to convey a message in order to entertain, to educate, to share with your listener, is probably one of the most ancient practice which had been observed and identified in all cultures and throughout human history.
As many of you, my first conscious encountering to what we call storytelling came from my parents who are still sharing with me short stories to make me understand some concepts, values or their wishes. I do have a vivid memory of me, at around 6 in Kinshasa, running from home into the street to visit a neighbour who’s grand mother was regularly sharing African Tales. We were there, a bunch of kids from my street, listening to her and transported to the places characters were evolving.
I’m not going to tell you how to tell stories even though I am learning to value, to design and to practice storytelling in my life and as part of my training delivery practice. This post is not about one way Xavier Damman, an innovate Belgium guy and friend of mine, who managed to turn this practice into an amazingly simple for web content generation; having to over come Californian investors doubts, to live his American dream. I like the guy though we’ll talk about the tool he created: Storify. 😉
Storify is a web application meant to allow its users to easily find, cluster and share their understanding of the information which is constantly generated on the web. Between all the Facebook status updates, Tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, etc., there’s a lot of stuff out there. But, in all that noise, there are some amazing things that people SHOULD see. We’re talking about the man who unwittingly Tweeted the raid on Osama Bin Laden and the videos from Libyans at the forefront of the revolution. Our goal is to be the tool that helps people find meaning through the noise of social media, and the Web in general. We try to make it easy for people to take elements from the social web and create a story with many voices that can be easily shared (and go viral).
This may not be relevant to you, but Storify has a very low and short time learning curve. Its team managed to design a very simple tool, that integrate the best elements from major web applications, being Social Media or Search Engine, into a tool you can easily get your hand on. For once, it takes longer to organise your thoughts to make your story then to learn how to use the tool.
Check the one about one of my training project: Leadership Summer School. And in order to help you design the best stories using their tools, they storified it to you on how to write better stories.
As one friend mentioned to me when I introduced her to the site, it might be great to have a more dynamic way to display elements on the home page which reflect more what has been published as at the moment, and a search as if you don’t have a link, you can’t know a story exists about a given topic.
May the tool lead its users and their audience to regularly come back for more? I do hope so. Some major media, such as Al jazeera earlier this month, are already engaging their visitors through such storytelling process.
Storify is on its beta phase and quite buzzing on the Twittersphere at the moment. Regarding the numerous benefits it can bring to give meaning to the vast amount of information we come across daily, it would deserve to be widely known.