While its creators will certainly disagree with this blogger’s blog post, after joining Storify, the new platform described as…
a company building tools to help journalists, bloggers and experts curate the real-time Web.
But really, the tool that’s in beta stage is nothing more, or less, than another blog platform. I’m not sure that I’m all that excited about something that essentially calls for giving traffic to someone else’s platform, but it’s here with us.
Why am I not excited about a “tool to help journalists bloggers and experts” in this way, even though it’s well-presented? Because too many journalists don’t know about the business of content-creation, and this will not help them learn it.
With Storify, I can’t earn revenue from what I produce, unless I happen to already be a YouTube Partner, and understand how to use Storify to continue to increase exposure for my video content. I can’t place ads on it, as far as know, either.
The central problem with media is not content creation – there are millions of blogs and thousands of posts created daily. The problem is that too many media content producers don’t know how to make money from what they produce, or understand or appreciate the importance of driving traffic to what they produce. They seem to operate from the idea that “if you build it, they will come.”
That’s not true.
Storify Must Improve SEO
The objective of Storify should be as much to help bloggers and journalists earn revenue as it is to “curate the real time web.” That’s great, but my own blogging platform can do that, and in Storify it took just four minutes for me to make an entry called “eHarmony Video Bio faking it update” using an embedded version of my YouTube video.
I can do that at Zennie62Blog.com
One improvement should be to partner with a social bookmarking platform and to automatically upload content to that site for more exposure. Right now, Twitter and Facebook are the only sharing options for Storify.
Stay tuned.