For the past few weeks I’ve been publishing three daily Twitter ‘newspapers’ with the paper.li platform and with the exception of a little pushback about autotweets getting a bit spammy, for the most part it’s been a positive and useful experience. 

paper.li is an easy to use platform that organises links shared on Twitter into an easy-to-read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag and I publish one which represents my whole Twitter community, another for the Isle of Man Twitter community and a third one that relates to only the people on Twitter I have actually met in person.

I really find value in the tool.  It helps me surface content that I might otherwise miss. It helps me reach out to tweeps that I might not @reply that often and I hope this will lead to deeper, more meaningful relationships. On a less positive, but equally helpful tact, it helps me identify off-topic tweeps that have crept into the community via my auto refollow tools, and I can unfollow these directly from the newspaper page.

There is an auto-tweet function that gives a shout out to Tweeps featured above the fold of each of my newspapers.  But I usually supplement this with another tweet mentioning as many from below the fold that can be contained within  140 characters.  Again, this allows me to touch base with a lot more people in my Twitter communities.

Each edition is published automatically every 24 hours and I receive an email letting me know when a new version goes live.

It seems to me that applications such as paper.li will become increasingly important in helping each of us find content that is directly relevant to us. As the level of white noise on Twitter and other social networking platforms goes through the roof, we mere mortals need all the help we can get to find what’s important to us.

Neville Hobson has also written about his experiences with paper.li here.

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