The main reason I love services like Tumblr and Posterous is that they make personal blogging simple. While you certainly still can write long-winded pieces about whatever you want, you can also just use a bookmarklet or email to send in individual pieces of content quickly. Storify seems like it could be the next step in that evolution. The new services, launching today in beta at TechCrunch Disrupt, is all about content curation from other social networking sites. Say there’s a tweet you see and want to build a story around (we do it quite a bit), with the click of a button, you can drag it into your Storify story. Maybe there’s a Flickr picture about the same topic — same idea, just drag it is. Maybe there’s a YouTube video, or a Facebook status update — all of this stuff can be easily pulled in. This creates one story of all this curated content. We appear to be on the verge of a new wave of content curation. Startups like Storify and Curated.by present users with a very low barrier to entry towards creating their own new content. It’s sad but true that a lot of people simply don’t have the time or desire to blog, so instead, why not let them do something with all the content they’re consuming, by aggregating it? That’s basically my read of Storify. And the service’s approach to spreading this content is smart. If someone uses a tweet of yours for a Storify post, for example, there’s an option to ping you about it on Twitter so you can then share it as well. And all of the content pulled into Storify still links back to the original source, so all of that can be shared as well. How do you monetize this? By inserting sponsored content into Storify story streams. Someone will undoubtedly be able to use Storify to build a killer story about this Disrupt conference, get to it and send us a link. The company has raised $50,000 up to date. Feedback and Q & A by expert judges Jeff Clavier, Gina Bianchini, Jim Lanzone, Ted Maidenberg, and Chris Sacca. I’ve abbreviated their names, for brevity obviously. JC: Is your official model getting users to pay? Storify: We want individual publishers to monetize the app. CS: Do premium content publishers want their content on their site? S: There’s always a header, “this story has been made by TC” It’s all about liberating distribution channels, you can drag in an add. JL: Congrats on the UI this was made by really great people, but it’s more the for HuffPo model than individual bloggers. TM: Is the quoting of a tweet okay? S: As a journalist, I want to verify the tweet, and we give people the tools to do that. GB: How do you thread the pieces together, to avoid Franken story, keep the story the same usecase. S: We want to display these in different ways, there’s a bunch of different usecases. JC: Is there a specific usecase? S: It’s for the bloggers who had a conversation on Twitter, and want to incorporate that realtime content into their stories. JC: What sort of proof do you have on the shared revenue model? Do you have any proof on that? Twitter is going to come out with sponsored tweets for example. S: Our product is social media and consuming news, right now we’re focusing on gathering a lot of attention. 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7Authors: MG Siegler