As a folklorist and a geek, I am very interested in digital storytelling, and I think there's lots of potential for using technology to innovate how we tell stories.

Two startups - both still in beta - have caught my attention recently:

Storify describes itself as a content curation tool for "bloggers, journalists and experts." Using Storify, you can tell stories with pieces from the social web -- YouTube videos, tweets, Flickr photos. Storify allows users to search Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Google and Delicious for a particular topic, then drag-and-drop pieces of content into a storyline. The stories created with the tool contain links to the original sources, which is something I think could make it useful for not just building digital current events and history projects.

Intersect is developing what I think is a really interesting tool for sharing stories. The site allows you to write a story and add up to 25 photos and 1 video. Simple enough. What's cool about Intersect is that your stories are tagged with the time and place where the story occurred. They're plotted on a timeline and a map. And then you can examine the other public stories that happened there -- in time and/or in space -- as well.

As the sites are in beta, you'll need to request invitations in order to join, but they are both definitely worth checking out.