The Paper.Li Daily Is Out!

By now you’ve probably seen one – a tweet that mentions you as being a major contributor to the “[Insert Twitter Follower Here]” Daily!  You click to see what the heck that is, and you find what looks like an online version of a newspaper or magazine titled whatever that user has titled it.  Things like “The Manure Tea Gardening Daily” or “The GeekGirls Daily,” and sometimes you can’t even tell what it is because it’s published in French, German, or Spanish.
 
These mysterious links, which don’t even always show your article anywhere prominent enough for you to find what they’re linking TO, come courtesy of a service called paper.li.  Started by a Swiss company called Small Rivers, paper.li is one arm of “a portable networking element that could be attached to content, that travels with it as it is being copied. This content that stays connected AND connects people interested in it, across the web, is what we call a river – and we see many such small rivers!”

Um, what?

As explained in their FAQ page, the Small Rivers paper.li functions as an aggregator that pulls together the articles that your followers have tweeted.  In other words, it looks at who’s in your Twitter stream and in your Facebook friendships, finds all the links that they have shared, and pulls them together in a daily “newspaper.”  It will automatically organize those linked posts by subject and tweet that your daily newspaper is out and it will also share the Twitter handles of the major contributors to the “issue” of the day.  You can customize the articles it searches for, and if and when your auto tweets go out, and when the daily issue is aggregated.

The idea here, as interpreted from the “river” statement above, is that a “daily paper” constructed from links shared by your social network will make it easier for you to actually read the content.  The more followers and friends you have, the more content will be shared with you, and the easier it will be to miss those links that might fall through the cracks.  Your daily aggregator will keep track of it all for you.

But there are those who share links that don’t necessarily want them to be broadcast to the rest of your network.  My friend L., who is battling cancer, recently found herself as a major contributor to a Twitter friend’s daily paper.li.  The link was a wrenchingly personal blog post that had been auto-tweeted from her blog, then picked up by the aggregator of that Twitter user.  “I’m not sure how I feel about this,” she said.  “Do I want this blog post shared with all those people?”

Turns out, she didn’t have to if she’d rather not.  Presumably in reaction to public feedback, Small Rivers introduced an “opt out” of sorts that they call “Stop Mentions” – which you can utilize to make sure that your name isn’t cited in the autotweets.  “We understand that some users do not wish to be thus mentioned. They can here make sure they are not mentioned in tweets prepared daily by paper.li on behalf of our users (who specifically requested it!).”

Or, one might say, you could just not blog, tweet, or use Facebook.  But then the terrorists would win.