Guest post: The ups and downs of using paper.li

Susie Newday blogs at New Day New Lesson about the lessons life hands her each day and at World Moms Blog. Susie is many things including a wife, mother of five, blogger, oncology nurse, webmaster and Life Coach in training. Mostly though, she is a person just like you who hopes to leave the world a better place for her kids.

Bloggers want to be heard.  We have things to say and to share and the more people we share it with, the better.

I personally started blogging because I wanted to make a difference in the world. I wanted to connect with all different kinds of people from all over the world and I believe that the only way to change the world is one person at a time. People need to connect on a personal level and it’s those connections that help foster tolerance, understanding, love and change.

A little over a year ago I spotted a Tweet that caught my eye. I don’t remember whose Tweet it was, but it announced that the person’s own daily newspaper was out. I was intrigued. In the next few days I spotted more and more personalised newspapers and my curiosity was piqued.

I clicked on one of the links and got to the paper.li site. I was impressed. What I saw was a professional-looking online newspaper with a home page, different tabs for different topics, hash tags, videos and pictures.  I saw a prompt to “start your paper”. Within a few minutes I had my own daily online newspaper – a newspaper that was generated daily and automatically from tweets, featuring links that people I follow had tweeted.

And then my “problems” started.

Each day the paper would automatically send a tweet stating The *Susie* Daily is out. Top stories by ____. It would choose a few of the people whose retweets were used in the paper and tweet their names as the contributors of top stories. Suddenly I was getting thanks from people who were proud to have been included in my paper and I was wracked with guilt. I can’t stand people thinking I did something special for them when all I did was to follow them and they tweeted a link with topics I had chosen.

As Twitter would have it, even my apologies about the paper being automatically generated created conversation and connections.

Impressions of the paper.li service

I think the paper.li online newspaper service is cool. It’s free and easy to set up and customize. If you find a paper you like, you can subscribe and have a whole page of interesting articles to read daily.

You can do more with the papers than I have done. You can make them very specific to certain lists of people and certain topics. You can generate them from Facebook as well as Twitter.  You can embed the paper on your website. You can add other content to your paper.

But here’s a new issue: Do I read all the articles in my paper every day? Not a chance. I would have no time to write let alone clean my house or feed my kids.

About

BritMums is the UK’s original collective of lifestyle bloggers and digital influencers, fueling the country’s most influential social content. We lead the online conversation with members who are parent social influencers creating content on topics ranging from food, parenting, travel, politics, style and more.

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