11.08.2010

Paper.li

Like the up-to-the-momentness of Twitter but miss reading your morning newspaper? My design-freak brother (@Stephen_Job) said once that one reason he doesn't use twitter as a news source is the layout.  He prefers the well designed online paper format (particularly http://www.nytimes.com and http://www.theglobeandmail.com) over the disjointed 140 character bursts of Twitter. 

Paper.li is an online application that builds a daily newspaper style page based on the articles, blog posts, videos and photos shared on Twitter (using a stream, list or hashtag) tailored to your custom tastes!  Not only does it create a top level "front page" but it uses tags and keywords to create nesting sections that change depending on the user (mine are usually Arts, Education, Health, Travel in that order)  Using the retweet function and daily "publication" feature you can encourage your followers to connect and interact with eachother building stronger community network.

Not only is Paper.li an interesting concept but it has a number of other things working for it:  functionality, quality design, easy adoptability, and constant tweaking updates.  Is this the future of news? No, but I do think it will form a lasting niche following (including myself)  I also really appreciate the evening edition feature.  Being a night owl I would prefer to see today's news at the end of the day than yesterdays news early the next morning, web based news doesn't have to wait for an overnight print/distribution cycle and Twitter based news doesn't even have to work around staff hours!

Check out the papers I've created:
a collection of my closest 
Twitter  friends and followers
mostly Ontario

a broader range of people 
I follow on Twitter
mostly arts, gardening and food

my main source of news 
my favourite news sources 
collected in a new way
selected by interest
mostly acronyms 
(CBC, BBC, TVO, OntAG, MNN)

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