The Future of Media: Storify and the Curatorial Instinct: Tech News and Analysis .

The explosion of real-time information through social networks and information services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has produced a never-ending firehose of content. It has also created an opportunity for tools such as Storify,the curation service that launched as an open beta Monday. Although the aggregation and filtering of the news is something that has traditionally been done by journalists and major media brands, tools like Storify allow anyone to perform the same kind of function, regardless of whether she’s been trained as a journalist — or even think of what she’s doing as journalism.

Storify is a relatively simple-looking tool that allows a user to pull in content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social-media services and create a kind of story stream. As I described in a post after the company’s launch as an invitation-only beta last fall, former Associated Press foreign correspondent Burt Hermanstarted the service after thinking about how journalists could use social media during a Knight fellowship (a video interview with Herman is embedded below). I’ve used Storify and it definitely makes social-media curation fast and relatively simple.

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