Burt Herman is a co-founder of real-time curation service Storify. I first heard about Storify on this Scobleizer post, and I’ve tested it for Samsung USA at SXSW and for myself at M2C (you can see an embeded example at the bottom of this post). I met with Burt at the Samsung Blogger Lounge at SXSWi and he was kind  enough to answer my questions. You can follow Burt @burtherman

1. What’s the story of Storify?

Storify is founded by Burt Herman, a former Associated Press bureau chief and correspondent, and Xavier Damman, a Belgian engineer who was publisher of a crowdsourced student magazine. Both share a passion for media and technology, and about how to reinvent online publishing to embrace the social Web. They met early last year and joined together to launch Storify in private beta in September 2010. Storify is about enabling storytellers to find the best of social media to tell elegant stories that resonate and enlighten. We want to empower storytellers with simple tools that help them find the media that matters amid the flood of media.

2. Journalists have always been storytellers but they haven’t always been “curators” of social content. What does social curation mean for the future of journalism?

Curation is a buzzword that represents what journalists have always done: Finding sources for information and synthesizing it into concise stories that a general audience can understand. We now have more sources than ever due to social media empowering people to create content, so journalists now have a much richer pool of information to choose from. This is an opportunity and the start of a new golden age for journalism.

3. There are some people that have been “curating” since the beginning of the web. Are you targeting such curators or do you believe Storify is for the masses?

Storify is about empowering users to easily tell stories using social media, and it can be used by anyone — journalists, bloggers, companies or just regular people. Everyone has a story to tell, from serious news like the Japan tsunami to a personal story about a wedding or child’s birthday. (more…)

Michael Jaindl is the VP of Client Services for Buddy Media, a Facebook management system that has been making a lot of news lately. The Buddy Media Platform allows brands, including Samsung (check out our Samsung USA page), to create engaging Facebook tabs, monitor the wall, schedule posts, and more.

b) Motivate your fans to share content:
Brands and agencies need to create interesting content that fans are motivated to share. Facebook users have become very savvy and they realize that there is a negative impact to spamming their network. They can receive a negative comment, be hidden, or worst yet defriended. Just as people understand that forwarding on an email chain letter is spammy they get that sharing boring content can hurt their social cred. Just because there is a share button on a piece of content doesn’t mean that anyone will actually share it. It’s important to create compelling content that your fans are motivated to share. (more…)

LinkedIn is unto something. While company pages have been around for over 2 years, a few months ago LinkedIn started allowing us to “follow” companies and edit those we work for – wiki style. These enhancements, plus the addition of the news feed, made it clear that LinkedIn was starting to go beyond networking and recruiting.

Today, LinkedIn launched a new feature for its company pages (also known as “inPages”) that enables companies to showcase products and services. These products can be recommended and reviewed through a new Like-ish “Recommend” button. Users can also share to their feed, Twitter, etc.  If this becomes widely used, it will be quite valuable for companies seeking feedback and word of mouth, and more importantly, to users who are increasingly skeptical of advertising.

40 companies already have one of these enhanced LinkedIn pages and I’m glad to confirm that Samsung is one of them. You can see the enhanced Samsung Electronics global page we’ve updated with the new features, as well as the newly created Samsung Electronics America.

LinkedIn has unique challenges that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube don’t have in terms of company profiles: Company pages on LinkedIn may have thousands of users that identify themselves with that company so any changes, mistakes, or incorrect information could be problematic. Of course, this is just the Social Media Manager in me talking because this is also a big advantage for LinkedIn. Why? Because LinkedIn users are real people displaying their real information and making real recommendations about real products. With 80 million users with carefully selected networks, it is likely that LinkedIn will provide more opportunities for companies and users to engage in ways that would not be possible elsewhere. (more…)

I just watched The Social Network, a fictional movie about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, based on Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires.” Below are some of the things I liked, some of the things I disliked, and a few final thoughts.

Liked:

10. I laughed every time the Winklevoss Twins were referred to as “The Winkelvii.”
9. The entire cast did a great job of creating believable and likeable characters.
8. About 30% of the movie is accurate, making some of the basic facts of the movie.. well, facts.
7. The scene in which Mark goes up to Case Capital (Sequoia): showing up late and wearing pajamas.
6. The movie can be enjoyed by anyone.
5. The music is great. Nice job Trent Reznor.
4. Many of the geeky computer moments, including the FaceMash hacks, were pretty realistic. I’m glad there were no ridiculous computer scenes a la “Hackers” and “The Net.”
3. The movie is based on a fantastic book you really need to read: “The Accidental Billionaires.”
2. The dialogue (aka conversations, ha!) is awesome. Just like the book, you get hooked from the very beginning.
1. This amazingly well shot, directed, and written movie is about Facebook, and that shows just how culturally relevant Facebook has become.

Disliked:

10. The Winklevii are really only a footnote in the history of Facebook. The movie, and the book, augment their relevance a bit too much.
9. There are too many stereotypes. Geeks are portrayed as loser-jerks without vision. Girls are portrayed as dumb objects. Ivy League students are portrayed as sex-crazed, shallow, and arrogant intellectuals.
8. About 70% of the movie is inaccurate, making most of the conversations in the movie completely false.
7. The scene in which Mark goes up to… Case Capital?? What the? Why make the movie about Mark and Facebook, shoot it in Harvard, and then fictionalize names of companies like Sequoia?
6. The movie can be enjoyed by anyone.
5. I only noticed the music because I wanted to notice it.
4. The most important moment in Facebook history was when it went live for the first time, but it seemed like that moment took less than 5 seconds in the movie. Hmm…
3. Many of the best parts of The Accidental Billionaires, including the ending, didn’t make it into the movie.
2. As great as Mark’s lines in the movie are, the movie turns Mark into something he clearly is not. There should be a big disclaimer at the beginning of the film expressing just how fictional it is.
1. The movie is about Facebook, but Aaron Sorkin is not even on it. Which is enough indication that the movie is only kind of about Facebook, without truly respecting the unstoppable awesomeness and world changing web site/platform that Facebook really is. Not cool that Sorkin can so boldly take advantage of Facebook without actually using it.

Final thoughts:

The Social Network is a great movie that I really enjoyed and highly recommend. However, it seems to have been brought to life by people that just don’t get it. Sure, it’s great entertainment, great filmmaking, and great acting, but without Mark’s name on it and without it being about Facebook, no one would’ve cared about it. The movie will be successful in huge part by osmosis, but it unfortunately does not really comprehend or share the big picture beyond the e-mails, the lawsuits, and the Hollywood fluff: Facebook was (and is) a brilliant idea that was brilliantly executed with a brilliant vision, resulting in one of the most brilliant companies on Earth.