Inside View from Ireland: The Paper.li Connection

September 01, 2010

The Paper.li Connection

SOMETHING ABOUT PAPER.LI works well for me. It might be its layout or perhaps the way it grabs text, avatars, key frames, images and short summaries. It’s one of the most useful ways to elegantly offer news and information that would have passed me by. I set up my daily paper but don't remember what I asked Paper.li to consider when sourcing stories. I know the daily result is often a list of serendipitous short stories that prompts me to read more about those who I follow on Twitter--not because of their tweets but because of their curatorial skills. Paper.li summarises the kinds of content that several dozen people in my own Twitter community find useful or interesting. All they have to do is offer a link to interesting content and those links cause Paper.li to churn away and produce an easy-to-read daily product. In many cases, Paper.li finds things I would like to discover myself but time constraints prevented me from seeing the stories as they broke. Paper.li reaches across more than 2000 people when producing my daily newspaper. It's like getting a daily freesheet but without the Page Three girls. It's like reading news I can use instead of listening to drivetime radio shows about predictable topics emerging in Irish mainstream media. I've received more happy texts from people who Paper.li fingered than from any sort of Follow Friday routine on Twitter. I'd rather follow the AT-links to some of the Twitter followers cited by Paper.li posts because that's actually the way I decide who to follow. And since Paper.li tweets the nics of the first three contributors to each daily newsrun, it increases the chances for others to retweet each Paper.li release, bringing your paper to the attention of the communities of those who retweet. Because I like all of these things, we're going to review the social value of Paper.li in the Social Media module taught at Tipperary Institute.