How to use Wakelet

Written with Barbara Mertlova

We have used Storify for sometime as a vital tool in digital storytelling. We have used it to tell the story of events that we run, and have used it with our clients to build their skills in digital storytelling. But Adobe has pulled the plug on it.

Wakelet is a Storify alternative — and is better in a whole variety of ways. A cleaner interface and a seamless way of importing and converting all your Storify stories. The customer service of this Manchester-based start up is also brilliant — all in all a great service. If you want to see how we use it, then take a look at our Wakelet home page.

Wakelet offers a great opportunity to collect information from a wide variety of sources and keep them conveniently in one place. Here is a brief guide on how to use it.

Make a collection

Once you have opened a free account with them, then you click on new collection/story.

Adding a collection opens up the option of gathering all of your content. Give it a title and some text to describe it.

The options of how to create interactive content include embedding Tweets, adding photographs, linking webpages or adding additional text. This provides opportunities to create a clear narrative around the content you are pulling together.

Choosing Media View allows the people browsing your website to interact with your links without opening additional windows/tabs

i.e. Youtube videos will play directly on your Wakelet site

Interactive content

The key asset of Wakelet is how interactive it is. The available options include linking external websites through general text. Highlight the target word or phrase, click on the link button as highlighted in yellow below, and type in/ctrl+v your link.

Clicking the Twitter logo will take you to an option to log into your Twitter account

Once you’ve logged in, you can browse tweets and users, in order to attach particular posts to your Collection

By typing in a URL in the “Add a link” line, you can link any websites, both personal ones and even online marketplaces like Amazon or eBay

Making it public (or not)

Once you’re happy with your collection, make sure it’s visible to the public so that people can read it. You can do that by clicking on the “globe” symbol highlighted in yellow here and choosing the most appropriate option from the menu.

The private and unlisted options are very useful.

If you wish you can then share your collection via a range of platforms, or you can embed it into a wordpress/any html editor. We have embedded Wakelets into websites for clients.

Import from Storify

Over on the left of your home page in Wakelet is a button marked Import from Storify. Click on that, enter your Storify username and you’re presented with all of your Storify stories. You can import all of them, or just select the ones that you need. However, now Storify has been terminated this facility may no longer work.

Some tips

You can weave together content from Twitter, blogs, websites, youtube and other online sources with your own text and photos to craft a compelling and powerful story. Here are some tips on using it:

• If you’re planning on using it to tell the story of an event then it goes without saying that you’ll need a hashtag which you need to publicise in advance. Go for something that’s short (less chance of typo mistakes) and which nobody else has used recently.
• Just collating a sequence of tweets doesn’t make for a good story. You need narrative to put this into context.
• Don’t feel duty bound to include every tweet. Be selective.
• Think about the story in advance. Have a structure in mind and a possible draft of your introductory few sentences.
• Make sure that your introduction sets the scene for a person who knows nothing about the story.
• Hit ‘publish’ once you’re happy with the content — remember you can still edit it afterwards.

In summary a very easy to use and flexible facility that should be a part of everyone’s digital storytelling toolbox. It has application in research, blogging, teaching and archiving. We have been using it most recently in tenant participation work with a housing association, public health projects, staff development events, and the 2017 Dundee Global GovJam.