Storify

The Rip.Mix.Feed. I chose was Storify. The reason I chose Storify was it proclaims to be a program with the ability to weave and keep social media links and stories together. I know from my use of Twitter that a lot of people subscribe to Storify and use it frequently. I thought this was a great assignment and wanted to try some Web 2.0 programs I haven’t been exposed to previously.

What I hoped to from this program was the ability to organize and keep threads together. I thought it would benefit me and maybe some of my peers if we could find something like del.icious that allow us to track and keep stories we looked at for research or personal interest. If I were researching new educational trends and came across something that looked right to me, rather than emailing my self the link (which is what I normally do), I could ‘Storify” them and keep them together. The other interesting piece I was hoping for, was the ability to put the stories in timeline format so I could see cause and effect, or natural progression. To achieve this…I needed to test it.

I chose Rob Ford (yes…the crack-smoking, it’s okay I was drunk Rob Ford) to use as test.

Screen 1

It didn’t work as well as I thought.

Although I was able to put stories together they didn’t move as smoothly as I hoped. I wanted to take a section of Rob Ford blunders, put them in chronological order and present them in timeline fashion. Storify allows you to search certain social media sites and google…in theory. I had to keep reloading the page the page to get the search function to work. Secondly the search bar is small and many of the stories were incomplete. Note – if just using twitter as a search source and results, Storify would rule! Once I placed the stories, I had to reload because the search function was lost. I am a fairly adequate person, technically, and I found Storify a little less than desirable as it pertained to user-friendliness. With practice, I believe that would improve. In addition, when I tried storify at schools I encountered all the issues (even though I added the storify extension on Chrome), so I decided to try it at home. Within minutes of using it, my laptop crashed…crashed hard…and wait for it…all of my MET stuff was on there (and not backed up). I saw my portfolio flash before my eyes. I was able to use the boot menu to get to my library and retrieve my documents prior to having to completely reinstall Windows 7 on my laptop from its partition.

I don’t know if Storify caused the crash (I honestly think it was coincidental), but the entire thing has left a bad taste in my mouth.

T