[Nick's Writing Blog] Paper.li - Start Your Own Daily Newspaper from Twitter
Nick
If you're on Twitter it will automatically create a newspaper-style website based on the links shared by you AND the people you follow on Twitter over the last 24 hours.
For Twitter users, Paper.li has two big attractions. First of all, it gives you a daily summary of the most popular links shared on your network. This is useful if, like me, you follow quite a lot of people and inevitably miss some interesting tweets.
The other attraction of Paper.li is that you can promote your newspaper to other readers, using Twitter, FaceBook, and so on. If you use Twitter at least in part as a marketing/PR tool, this is great for attracting more interest for your tweets and more followers to your Twitter account.
Setting up your newspaper is almost ridiculously easy. Just go to the Paper.li website and click on Create a Paper in the top right-hand corner. You will then be able create an account using your Twitter ID. Once you have done this, you will see the page below...
As you can see, you have three options. To create a daily newspaper based on your own Twitter account, just enter your Twitter username in the left-hand box and click on Create. You can also create newspapers based on a Twitter hashtag or a Twitter @list.
And, amazingly, that's all there is to it! It takes a while for the service to create your first issue, but after that it continues to do so on a daily cycle. You can choose to have Paper.li send you an email every time a new issue is published. You can also set it to send out automatic notifications to all your Twitter followers.
I've been using Paper.li for a couple of weeks now to create the Nick Daws Daily, and am impressed with the amount of interest and comment it has been generating. I've also been getting messages from people whose articles are quoted in the newspaper thanking me for the mention - actually slightly embarrassing, as their inclusion was of course entirely automatic.
Indeed, that is perhaps the slight drawback with Paper.li as a broadcasting medium. While it's very easy to set up, you have no direct control over what goes into it. This depends entirely on whom you follow and how popular they and their tweets are. The service automatically chooses the most popular (presumably the most retweeted) links to create the stories featured in your paper.
In my case, while I mainly follow people in the writing world, there are also some personal friends, clients, Internet marketing gurus, musicians, media people, celebrities, news services, and so on. Consequently, the stories that get served up are pretty varied, and the 'headlines' aren't always the stories I would have chosen personally, based on the interests of most of my followers.
If you want to use Paper.li mainly as a broadcasting medium, there would be a case for restricting the people you follow on Twitter to those whose tweets would be of clear interest to most of your other followers (your target market, as it were). You could maybe then have a separate Twitter account for your wider circle of interests. This obviously complicates matters, but applications such as Tweetdeck do cater for users with multiple accounts, and a growing number of people are now doing this. Maybe I will at some stage myself, but for now readers of my newspaper will see stories from the full range of people I follow on my Twitter account, obscure prog rock bands and all!
So that's the lowdown on Paper.li and the Nick Daws Daily. For the time being I'm pleased with the response it has been getting, so I definitely plan to keep it running for a while yet. If you're on Twitter, in my view Paper.li is definitely a service well well worth checking out.
* Have you tried Paper.li and what do you think of it? Have you any tips for getting the most from the service? Please post any comments below!
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Posted By Nick to Nick's Writing Blog at 10/05/2010 01:18:00 PM