4 Storified Reasons SXSW Was Worth The Hassle From Al Gore, Sean Parker, Baratunde Thurston

The social curation tool Storify was a big winner at the interactive portion of this year’s South by Southwest festival, having received the award for excellence in social media. Founded in 2010 by Xavier Damman and Burt Herman, Storify is a platform that allows users to pull in tweets, Facebook posts, and other social media content from around the web to tell a story. The end product lives on Storify.com, but can be embedded on any website as easily as a YouTube clip.
From traditional newspaper titans like the Wall Street Journal to citizen social media enthusiasts, users from all over the web have taken to Storify to turn disparate, disorganized bits of social media into coherent narratives. Storify’s latest innovation is an automated tool that allows South by Southwest attendees to “automagically” create a story collecting all of their SXSW-related tweets in one place, without having to visit Storify.com to wrangle the content manually.
As we look back on 2012’s SXSW Interactive, it’s only fitting that we recap the weekend’s highlights through Storify itself. Here are four of the best social summaries we found of the festival’s most talked-about and tweeted-about events: