Create Stories Using The Social Web With Storify

I first met Storify Cofounder Xavier Damman at a conference in San Francisco one year ago. He was working on a product called Publitweet back then. He also built in 24 hours ListiMonkey right at the time when Twitter launched the list feature. He was very enthusiastic and ready to take the next step.

We're now living in the connected age of social media and we try to catch up with never-ending feeds. Whatsoever on Twitter or Facebook. It's been kind of cool in 2010. We werescrolling on the Twitter feed looking for interesting stuff to learn about.

But another truth lies ahead: it's getting more and more overwhelming to keep up with what's happening with your friends and Twitter followers. People increasingly spend quite a good deal of their life online. People are sharing more and more stuff. People get excited about telling their friend about that awesome video. It all comes down to bring so much noise.

We need filters to get the most relevant information from the noisy social medias. Storify is kind of big deal on the web curation scene. It's about finding the meaning in the noise and turn that meaning into a format that people can actually understand. That format is a story. And people read stories. The stories you create with Storify are made of tweets, status updates, youtube videos and pretty much every other social web service.

I think it's very promising. To me it'll be a lot more handy to tell the story of what happened in a concert while putting together real-time pieces of the show.

Have a look at this recent interview of Storify Cofounders by Robert Scoble:

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Brain Rules

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Brain Rules is one of those books that really makes you feel smarter. Who wouldn't want to know how your brain is running?

I loved this book. John Medina did a great work in putting his tremendous knowledge into twelves small chapters. The book is packed up with many stories, each one illustrating one brain rule at a time. I learned a handful of tricks for dealing with school, work and home life.

Here are some of the notes that I put in my Moleskine:
  • Most of the events that predict whether something learned also will be remembered occur in the first few seconds of learning.
  • Many of the same mechanisms that cause you to run from a predator are also used when you're having sex.
  • Every brain is wired differently. Even though the current system is founded on expectations that certain learning goals should be achieved by a certain age. Students of the same age show a great deal of intellectual variability.
  • One NASA study showed that a 26-minute nap improved a pilot's performance by more than 34%. The afternoon nap is a biological need.
  • If information is presented orally, people remember about 10%, tested 72 hours after exposure. That figure goes up to 65% if you add a picture.
I first heard about this book in Scott Berkun's Confession of a Public Speaker and I'm sure he did benefit a lot from it too.
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