It was a couple of months ago when I first starting noticing some of my favorite tweeps (Twitter people) publishing their own “newspapers.” It was a couple of weeks ago when I decided to head over to paper.li to start publishing my own paper.
Paper.li is a free service that takes links from the people you follow on Twitter and organizes those links into a virtual paper for easy reading.
Creating a newspaper is easy: you log into paper.li with your Twitter account and then have four ways of creating a newspaper:
- Twitter user + those being followed (note, this doesn't have to be you)
- Twitter #tag (such as #seo, #maine or #bacon)
- Twitter @list (any list you or another tweep have created, such as https://twitter.com/i/lists/2685461
- Custom paper (which gives you a little more control over your newspaper, including focus based on an advanced twitter search, like http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands=bacon&phrase=&ors=¬s=&tag=&lang=all&from=&to=&ref=&near=portland%2C+me&within=15&units=mi&since=&until=&rpp=15
Once you choose a source your paper will be created, and updated daily. There's a home page, and sections for Travel, Business, Technology and popular hashtags. The newspaper also includes shared videos, tweets, and, of course, advertisements. (No, you don't get a share of the profits. However, I can imagine that in the near future we'll see competitors who are willing to share ad revenue to increase participation.)
You can also choose to have paper.li promote your newspaper when it comes hot off the presses through your Twitter account. This is a good way to share some of the highlights from your feed, as well as promoting some of the people you follow (a new twist on #followfriday.)
This is also a good way of getting the attention of people you follow who may not follow you back, or just don't have as much interaction with you as possible. I've noticed that quite a few people have retweeted my paper.li tweets when they see their name there.
This too will run its course, just like #followfriday did before it. However, for now, paper.li is easy to set up, fun to use, and can be a visually engaging way of seeing what your tweeps are sharing.