Monday, February 14, 2011

Publish Your Own Newspaper (Sort of)

This is so cool!  Paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag and publish every 24 hours - or change the frequency if you'd rather have morning, evening or even weekly editions.  It's currently an alpha version which means new features are being added regularly, and they welcome feedback.

It's free to sign up, and you can sign in with facebook or twitter, then choose what you want included in your newspaper - use your twitter account, a list, or even a specific #tag.  I just went with my twitter feed and came up with The bcmom Daily. The title of the newspaper can be changed, but I'm going with that for now.
What does paper.li do to make a newspaper?
Publishing a newspaper is no small task! Here is an overview of all the things paper.li does in the background for you:
  • extract all tweets that include URLs
  • extract the content found on these URLs:
    • text, e.g. blog post, newspaper article
    • photo, e.g. Flickr, yfrog, Twitpic, ...
    • video, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, ...
  • analyze the extracted text for topic, e.g. Politics, Technology, ...
  • surface the day's most relevant articles (using paper.li magic)
  • construct a newspaper frontpage using the filtered articles, photos and videos
Paper.li archives all editions, so you can go back and read them any time you want.  You can send out automatic tweets (if you want to) every time the paper is updated, include a widget on your blog, create custom papers and more.  I haven't explored it all yet.  I just thought it was super cool and had to share.  Check it out.  Publish your own paper.  Subscribe to mine.  Have fun.