Locate a Tumblr blog in your field or hobby of interest and share this on your blog.
OR
Search the web for stories about Storify and other content platforms that have closed down, and reflect on why it can be important to own and backup your own content.
For this post I think I’ll concentrate on the Storify side of things. I had started my own Storify account, probably in grad school, and probably as part of my work for #TvsZ. Because #TvsZ took place entirely on Twitter, Storify provided a convenient way to collect tweets onto one page. I noticed it was also being used for different Twitter chats, which was also useful because threads on Twitter turn into an utter mess, although it’s better now than it had been:
Was definitely context collapse in that conversation as it moved across multiple threads quoting bits and pieces of the original thread, which started here: https://t.co/ldNCq0lTTT
Threading on Twitter is at least easier now than it was back in the good ol’ days 10 years ago 🙂
— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) February 12, 2019
I’ll admit, I wasn’t an avid user of the service. Honestly, there are so many tools I’ve signed up for over the years – as someone who works in EdTech it’s almost a requirement – but I stick to only a handful that I find really useful. So if something as simple as having to login is there, that can be a big enough barrier for me to stop using it <cough> xMOOCs </cough>. I knew quite a few people that used the tool though, and I can recall CogDog (aka Alan Levine) posting about Storify’s demise – actually, over the years he has had quite a few posts about tools closing down. On December 12 you see Storify is Dead. Who Needs it? which is a collection of Tweets ON WORDPRESS. About a week later he blogged Storify Bites the Dust, detailing how to extract your content from Storify, but I think the first sentence is maybe one of the most important parts of the whole post:
How many more times do people have to get stiffed by a free web service that just bites the dust and leaves you bubkas?
It’s not only free services, although they are the major culprit. Adobe is not innocent either when it comes to terminating useful software. So what can we do? Well, as Alan suggests, we can use our own open source self hosted services. Is that for everyone? Well maybe not, but considering how much use I get out of my pretty affordable Reclaim hosting account, plus the amazing support of Jim, Tim, Lauren, and Meredith, I’d say it’s a good choice. I think most of what Alan shows off in those two posts are ‘normal’ WordPress posts. As I was reading through Thing 15 it got me thinking. What if there was a WordPress theme that basically did the work of being able to quickly and easily add things to a board, and tag and categorize them? Of course, given the length and randomness of my password to create new posts in WP makes it a bit tricky to use this blog for example. I definitely don’t do it from my phone and not while just cruising Twitter. Then it hit me, SPLOTS! Yes, my answer to most questions these days, SPLOTs. Given the way that Alan’s creation, TRU Collector, TRU Writer, or SPLOTBox I think would work really well for this. I can imaging myself cruising twitter, finding a conversation I’d like to maybe save, then copying the links (even while on my phone), popping open a webbrowser and simply navigating to the collection page on any of these SPLOTs, dropping it it, and having tags and categories straight away. This is something I think I’ll have to come back to and try out to see if the workflow is ok. And ta-da, maybe I don’t have to sign up for another free webservice that will mine my data and then shut down in 3 years.
Closed Sign by JamesAlan1986, published on Wikimedia under a CC BY-SA 3.0 License.
2 responses to “Thing 15 – Digital Curation”
Maybe it will be called “SPLOTify”!
Depends too on what you see putting together, a pool of saved tweets to mix and match later into collections? For just making strings of tweets (which was many saw storify for, it did much more), Twitter moments work great. Easy to add while in twitter.
Otherwise there’s still social bookmarking. I pay for pinboard and use it heavily, and can organize with tags.
SPLOTify has a way better ring to it than “SPLOTerest”.
I always forget about Twitter moments. That does look like a way simpler version of what I was thinking about in this post. Most often, when I saw Storify in use it was a list of tweets with some commentary in between each tweet by the Storifier. So I was thinking that the autoembed, feature might work in the rich text editor in TRUWriter or something, so you could construct the post right there. Too much of a workaround compared to Twitter moments now that I look at it more closely.
I used to use Delicious way back in school, and later Diigo. I found the workflow for Diigo pretty good for a variety of things, but never coughed up cash for it and before I knew it they were deleting things I’d saved as I started exceeding increasingly stricter features on the free accounts. Needless to say it’s now abandoned.
I heard about pinboard, I think on one of the Contrafabulist podcast episodes, and should look into that more closely. I do miss the functionality and workflow I had with the other social bookmarking tools.