Did you know that San Francisco had a population of 806,000 in 2008, but only covers 46.7 square miles giving it a density of 17,323 per square mile, the second most densely-populated city in the United States? I didn’t. But the alpha (request an invite) public version of Qwiki does, and after you see the story Qwiki created when I searched for “San Francisco”, so will you.

What Qwiki – the winner of the TechCrunch Disrupt “best of show” award less than a month ago – does is stitch together all those facts, with images and videos on what you’re searching for into a story – the distillation of an armload of internet data into something your brain can grab ahold of and keep. Humanity has been using stories to manage, organize, transmit and make sense of large amounts of data for a very long time. Now Qwiki does the same for a hefty 2 million term sample today and ultimately anything you want to know on the web.

While this alpha has a few sharp edges, it’s remarkably useful right now, and not just for kids bored out of their minds by regimented standardized education that relies on static dead-tree books. Plug into Qwiki “Semantic Web”, “jQuery”, “Web 2.0”, or Jeff Bezos and you’ll get a 1-2 minute video/image montage as a very listenable computer voice narrates what you see, except you don’t get a montage and computer voice, you get a short compelling story with plenty of links to other Qwikis and of course Wikipedia, Flicker, YouTube and Google.

“Qwiki is actually a technology platform that delivers information as an experience,” explained Qwiki CEO and co-founder Doug Imbruce in an email to me this Monday morning. “This reference tool that is in the alpha stage, is just the first product offering that uses this technology. As for who this product is for – well it’s for all Web users who, like me, are frustrated and overwhelmed by the amount of information that is now available on the Web. There are a number of use cases – education tool, travel guide, etc. One user even said they saw this tool as a way for them to help learn English.”

Qwiki’s prologue is the story of how Doug – a storied web education guy – and Louis Monier – the CTO and a founder of the pre-Google search engine Alta Vista and arguably one of the digital fathers of web search, decided for people to really get the value and not just the grief of infinite information on the web, people need technology to weave that information into stories that have meaning.

There’s a point in the great cult-movie V for Vendetta where V says, “No, you already have all the information. All the names and dates are in you head. What you need, what you want, is a story.” But stories can be true or they can be false – how do we know Qwiki’s stories are true? “As I mentioned, Qwiki is a technology platform – it crawls the Web to get relevant information using coded algorithms,” Doug replied. “Then, these go through an automated filtering process, allowing us to mass-produce Qwikis on the fly. Right now, most of the text is from Wikipedia along with about 25% of the media. The other 75% of the media comes from thousands of other media sources. If you look at the bottom of each Qwiki page, we provide links to all source media on the “detail view” of each image or video clip.”

Of course, Qwiki plans to monetize: “advertisers will definitely be able to utilize the Qwiki technology in a number of ways down the road to help extend the reach of their brand”, Doug added. I just hope someone turns this loose where it’s needed most – in schools. While Qwiki doesn’t work yet on an iPad (it’s Flash-based, and yes, they are hiring), once it does sometime after 1.0 launches this winter for PCs and Macs, I can see putting it and Flipboard on an iMac and waking up a lot of 10th-graders to what’s actually going on in their world.