How to build influence and help friends with a newspaper
Sep
1
Written by:
2010/09/01 10:02 AM
Remember the old days when the newspaper was the most widely used form of updating yourself with the latest happenings around you. Remember how so many people would sit with a cup of coffee and glean over the newspaper, reading articles that they were interested in.
Since the dawn of electronic media the printed paper has suffered a lot. But now you can get back to that familiar scene of sipping on a cup of coffee and reading your daily newspaper with paper.li
Twitter Daily Newspaper With Paper.li
Paper.li is a web app that turns your Twitter stream into a daily online newspaper. Your Twitter newspaper is updated every day just like the morning printed newspaper.
A small internet startup based in Switzerland called SmallRivers
, developed a Web app called Paper.li that basically lets you turn Twitter streams, tags and lists into daily online newspapers.
Paper.li takes your Twitter stream and extracts links to any news stories, photos, videos, etc. Using what the company calls “semantic text analysis tools” to analyse the Twitter stream. It then determines whether the stories are relevant. Resulting in the links and related content in sections based on the context of the link that are displayed in the paper.
Paper.li allows you to sign in with your twitter account and gives you three options to produce a daily newspaper based on the information you want to read. You can:
- Add you name and create a newspaper about you and your social network based on all your followers (like this one: The Robert Bravery Daily)
- Add in a #hashtag that you monitor or wish to keep a good eye on and you read about a lot.
- Add a Twitter list of specific people you want to read about daily (like this one: Bloggers Daily)
Note: Because paper.li in still in Alpha, you are only allowed to create 10 papers in total. So use them wisely.
Paper.li also creates and arranges categories and topics based on your stream. Popular topics include:
Helping Friends
Since your paper.li papers can be about lists, people or hashtags – there is great opportunity to help people. Their Tweets and links, blog posts and stories are then featured in your newspaper. With direct links to their blog posts.
Being mentioned in a daily newspaper , or anything for that matter, is almost always good for a Twitter user and their blog. Bloggers are always on the lookout for ways to promote their blogs and stories. What a better way to help them out by creating a online newspaper that features their stories on a daily basis.
Taking it a step further, while hovering over the author of each “article”, you can see the original Tweet, and take several actions:
- You can reply,
- Your can retweet
- You can favourite
- You can Follow/Unfollow the tweep
What a great way to pay back to the social media and blogging community.
Building Influence
It is always great to have your content shared and to be recognised. By following anyone on Twitter they have a chance to be featured on your paper, if they are featured and they actually are paying attention they might just appreciate it.
When you feature your followers on a service like paper.li they are more likely going to be recognised and in turn recognise you.
When I created my first paper.li newspaper, within days I was also featured in other tweeps newspapers'. It’s a reciprocal thing that has potential to become a huge community building mechanism.
By recognising others you in turn build influence. It’s a never ending circle, the more you recognise others the more they recognise you. That's influence.
Conclusion
I think its a great services. Still in Alpha though, so probably has some improvements to make and iron out some bugs. But overall a nice job.
Check if your articles are included in my daily papers.
What do you think of paper.li? Is it a service that you might make use of? Perhaps you think it just a waste of time? Let me know.
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