Looking for meaning in social streams using Hootsuite and Storify

I’m working hard covering the crisis in the euro zone (Ireland, Portugal, Spain, etc). It’s a crisis which is not “just financial”, it’s a real social tragedy as well, and I feel it should get more attention on networks such as Twitter. It seems that the newest version of some gadget is incomparably more important to most people on Twitter than developments in the economy which could change the course of history for whole continents.

However, there are great discussions going on about the situations on blogs, on Twitter and Facebook. I’m trying out some tools to monitor and curate that stuff. I read an inspiring post by Tris Hussey about how to build a social media dashboard on TNW Lifehacks. Once concrete result is that I’m trying out Hootsuite now to monitor and organize my social media streams (Twitter, Facebook, I’ll add Foursquare and LinkedIn). Until now I was using Tweetdeck and Seesmic. I’m not sure yet which service I do prefer, but this Hootsuite tutorial (also by Hussey) seems very promising.

Of course, it’s not only a matter of organizing incoming information and engaging in conversations, but also of putting stories back out. I’m using Storify for that, and Robert Scoble had a great video interview with the founders of that service (even talking about game mechanics!):


In the meantime another curation service, curated.by, went into public beta. Other curation services are Keepstream and Bag the Web, I still have to try out those tools but for now I do like the newsy, journalistic approach of Storify as you can see for instance in my euro crisis coverage (in Dutch and English) or in this old post about Second Life in a browser.

Read also my previous post: making sense of our streams, in real time.

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