That's another Storify

I was reading Mark Schaffer's blog post ‘ What Do I Write About? ‘,  the other evening, where he suggests that when we are stuck, we have the following options: “Look to your peer groups, look in your comments, look in your key words and Google it”.

I found his post very useful and I happened to repost it to Facebook, where one of my Facebook friends then thanked me for posting the article because she too found it very useful. She suffers from bloggers block, as I do.

As a blogger,  I understand exactly what this is like because I too have become stuck on what I should write about on more than one occasion and given that my blog is 'Funteresting' - intended to be both Fun and Interesting - sometimes doubt creeps in and I ask myself ‘am I generating either of those two states for my readers?’

However, I find that the interesting and fun things have a tendency just to show up and I notice them if I am aware.
Note that I did not say "paying attention".  Theses are different states:

• Paying attention is being conscious and bringing my focus to things (I go to it)
  whereas
• being aware is allowing things to come to me from my experience in the moment, into my unconscious and conscious states (They come to me).

There is always a pattern to things that when you start linking them together, be it peer groups,  comments, key words, Google finds  or simply what you become aware of. A story emerges.

So what of storify.com?

Storify is a web site where you can create stories out of postings from elsewhere on the web, such as Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, BreakingNews, Flickr, Chute, SoundCloud, Instagram, GetGlue, StockTwits, Disqus, Google, Tumblr, RSS Feeds, Embedded URLs and Storify itself.
 http://storify.com/tour gives a much better view on how Storify works
The “create” screen has two halves:

• A Media collection area where you can search external sites
  and
• A Story Pad where you can assemble your story
  and add your own commentary  and pictures,  as you assemble the story

It strikes me as a great place to assemble your stories even if you never publish them because you can layout your story, see it and gauge if it fits what you want to create. The ability to review the media that you use is extensive and it doesn’t stop there.

I also use http://ifttt.com (If This Then That) another site where I can link together different elements of various websites together to take actions across sites or as ifttt themselves say “Put the internet to work for you”
Storify is one of the sites listed by ifttt which means I can automate my media collection amongst other things. For example, here are some of the recipes created by other ifttt users:

• “If someone tweets a mention of me, it goes to my StoryPad on Storify” - created by jeffthechimp
• “Send starred Google Reader items to Storify” - created by kopischke 
• “#instagram to #storify” - created by ajbatac
• “Post story on #storify, send it to #facebook” - created by by fr33q

Storify allows you to ‘Export’ your stories to Wordpress,  Tumblr, Posterous, Drupal and Mailchimp although, for whatever reason, I have never achieved exporting to Wordpress directly however using Scoop.it!‘s bookmarklet I can post a summary of the story direct to Wordpress and can add my comments there.

Grabbing the HTML code from Wordpress also allows me to blog in Ecademy.com

Happy Blogging!