I am always watching for new ways people publish online. I typically get an account with whatever the latest, potentially paradigm shifting, service hits the market to see if it is really all that different. I’ve seen a few recently that are proving interesting to me. I thought I’d share some quick thoughts and look for reactions.
This isn’t exactly new, but I am still working to wrap my head around the reasons I like it so much. The things I can understand are the elegance in the presentation, the focus on the story, and the inline commenting capabilities. Oh, and then there is the whole community curation thing that really peaks my interest. We are talking to our SB You platform provider, EduBlogs, about adding capabilities that allow people to dissect a post and add comments in-line … imagine how interesting that will be for collecting feedback or tearing apart drafts. I’ve written in Medium and I just like the overall simplicity.
This one isn’t new either, but I have really just started to wrap my head around how it works. To make it really simple, Storify allows you to create a “mashup” story from things happening across the web around a topic, person, hashtag, location, etc and put it into one shareable page. Once you start exploring various Storifies it becomes clear what it is all about … I think there are incredibly powerful opportunities in that simple idea for sharing personal content with that of the larger Internet. A great example is how this blog post holds both original content from the author and snipits gather from the social web to tell the story of a conference session.
This one seems more new than the other two and is slightly different in that it is created by the staff at Rookie and not as a user created publications. Where it gets interesting is how it mashes together original content with curated reactions from across the web … what sets it apart is that the integrated social content feels like it is a part of the story. They even pitch each story with highlighted text exposing, “reactions from …” It is certainly better observed live than in words.
