It’s near impossible to tell a story that doesn’t have a place or a time. As readers and just as humans we have a difficult time connecting with a story — be it a friendly anecdote or a news article — that doesn’t tell us where it happened and when. As writing and storytelling has evolved online those two components have largely been relegated to the background — no less important of course, but often useful as metadata, a tag or pin on a map.

Intersect is trying to bring that information to the forefront of storytelling and wants people to build around what happens to them at fixed points in time and space. Part blogging tool, part social network, Intersect lets users tell stories as they are pegged to a certain time and place in a way that would eventually create a timeline for each user. But pulling back wider, Intersect will allow communities to share a more complete narrative of certain events.

An example? How about The Daily Show and Colbert Report’s Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive in Washington D.C. The Washington Post partnered with Intersect to tell stories from the event, both from attendees but also reporters:

The Story Lab team will be filing stories throughout Saturday’s events on the Mall via Intersect, a new site designed to collect and present stories live and from the scene. Here on washingtonpost.com and on Intersect’s site, we’ll be documenting the scene and asking those in attendance and those watching at home to weigh in on the politics vs. entertainment question. Please join us.

Let’s consider how this would work without Intersect: Anyone covering the event would hope for a universally accepted hashtag on Twitter, curate the best Tweets from the day, search for any photos on Flickr, and maybe, if they’re crafty, create a Google Map that pins Tweets and photos to locations on the National Mall.

Instead, with Intersect, any user can go in and automatically enter the time and location and proceed to write updates and post photos. (Like, say, the President get a donut while campaigning in Seattle.) But in order for Intersect to work they’ll need to answer two big questions: how to attract an audience to populate intersections, and how to introduce a new routine to users (i.e. get them to write about Intersections as much as they tweet or post to Facebook).

The Post partnership — an example of one potential route to an audience — was promoted online by the Post and Intersect, garnered its share of Twitter buzz and made a splash at the Online News Association conference, all of which seemed to generate interest in using the service on Rally day. Looking over Intersect there are more than 40 stories connected to the rally and the National Mall, each offering a different vantage point, the kinds reporters covering these type of events typically like to seek out.

Post reporters using a beta version of an Intersect iPhone app posted stories and photos that were fed to WashingtonPost.com and Intersect’s site, where they were side by side with updates from other users.

Since the content from the Rally was shared on both sites, Intersect demonstrated its value as both a platform for stories and a tool for crafting them. That may be key to any future success for Intersect, since they’ll need high visibility and a combination of big events and big partners willing to experiment.

Though Intersect is not expressly a platform for journalism, it could be applied to news gathering, as evidenced by the Post’s partnership. Intersect could allow journalists to either tap into an existing community to see what background they can provide for a story, or be used to invite others to tell a story. I spoke with Monica Guzman, Intersect’s director of editorial outreach, and she gave the example of Seattle’s Space Needle, which celebrates 50 years in 2012. A journalist could begin a story on Intersect about the needle and ask readers to fill in the history of the landmark over the last 50 years.

“It’s this idea of you can actually tell your whole story, go all the way back, see how you’ve changed,” Guzman told me. “That’s kind of cool.” Guzman used to work at SeattlePI.com, where she ran its main blog.

Another reason Intersect could be valuable to journalists is that it’s a system set up to provide context in stories. “I think it’s absolutely critical. A lot of new media journalists are seeing that need to bring context back into journalism,” she said.

Intersect does have a social network meets real-world feel to it, as members have a presence online, but one tied to specific places. Instead of simply building online “community,” Intersect could also serve as a means of growing a physical community and connecting people around certain localities, like the story of the change in a neighborhood as told by the people who live there, she said.

If the launch of services like Storify and Intersect tell us anything, it’s that aggregation and collaboration in storytelling may be reaching a new plateau, one where there is a symbiotic relationship between the technology and the craft behind how we share stories.

Guzman sees Intersect as part of the broader change in news, the transition from journalists as the sole keepers of news and information to journalists finding ways to collaborate and reach out to readers. “I learned through the Big Blog just how much news is becoming a conversation,” she said. “It’s about bringing out new voices and perspectives.”