I ended 2011 the same way I started 2012, with a story. To be more precise, in December I had something to say about a year in the life of Screen Machine, Scotland’s mobile cinema that I’ve blogged about a few times here, and I needed a good way to tell it.
The answer was Storify.
For those who haven’t heard of Storify, it’s a tool that allows users to curate social media posts from numerous accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo. It’s free to set up and easy to use, so it seemed perfect for my needs.
With numerous stories in the press, video published, comments on Twitter and other mentions for Scotland’s most unusual cinema, I spent a few hours looking back through my work around the web and ended up with the aptly titled Screen Machine: 2011 year in review post.
The success of that post led me to pull together another one this month, detailing the online reaction to the repeat of a 1974 BBC Play for Today, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, on BBC ALBA.
While repeats of old TV shows don’t usually cause much of a stir, this one was quite rare, and I wrote about it on ReelScotland just ahead of the screening. When the number of page visits and tweets went through the roof, and I led a live Twitter commentary of the screening, I collected the most interesting responses into another Storify.
The result, Twitter reaction to The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil on BBC ALBA, has already notched up almost 250 views, while my embedding of the post on ReelScotland has itself had many hundreds of views.
I spend a lot of time on Twitter trying to sift through a mass of dross for the best information, and being able to present that to my own followers, or those of Screen Machine or ReelScotland, in a concise way is going to become more important. Hopefully I’ll have another opportunity to use Storify soon.