The Graham Storrs Daily – Read All About It!
First there were blogs. Then there were RSS feeds. Then there were feed readers. Now, there is Paper.li!
Never heard of it? Well, it hasn't been around long, and you'd prbably have to be into Twitter to notice it. If you are, you've probably seen tweets saying "The Fred Bloggs Daily is out now!", or "The #Winelover Daily is out now!", or whatever, and wondered briefly what that was all about. You might even have clicked through to find a sort of newspapery thing full of short intros to what might be interesting articles about wine, or sci-fi, or whatever the "Daily" in question said it was about.
I started noticing these announcements and I was confused about the thing at first, too, until I saw that each Daily had a "Create a paper" button on it. So I clicked it and had a go at setting one up and it suddenly all made sense.
Basically you just register a Twitter account with paper.li and it does the rest. Each day, it looks at all the people you follow, then extracts bits from a selection of their blogs, sorts them into categories, and assembles them in a newspaper-like format. If you have a lot of people you follow, and they are all in broadly the same field (as mine all are) it seems to work pretty well. Which is a huge compliment to the people at Paper.li who programmed the thing.
I'm not sure if anyone at all is reading it – it doesn't provide any stats – and, if they are, whether they're enjoying it, but it is great for me as it provides a random overview of the blogs of the people I follow each day – a pretty good digest of what I'm interested in, in fact! If you'd like to see what I mean, take a look at http://paper.li/graywave. It is updated every 24 hours so whatever you look at will be current.
You can tweak your Daily to focus on other topics (for example, I subscribe to The #Atheist Daily myself) by giving it a hashtag to follow instead of it just following the people you follow. There are already #Writer dailies and #Scifi dailies and so on to subscribe to. But I think it is the personal Dailies that I find most interesting. Since their content is drawn from the people the owner is following on Twitter, each Daily really is a snapshot of that person's interests. Of course, someone who auto-follows or is indiscriminate about who they follow will see that lack of focus reflected in their Daily. I have been careful only to follow people in particular fields who are particularly interesting and I think that gives my Daily a nice coherence.
Well, I like it anyway. But then I would, wouldn't I?
