Like many in the Blogosphere, I use a collection of tools to help publicize this blog and other interesting information I find online. One of those tools is paper.li. Some folks seem to like paper.li and others don't.
For: It's a nice collection of stuff that ___ reads. I can read it all at once. I don't have to click the link to see what it is about.
Against: Too many ____ Daily's tweets and retweets just add junk tweets to twitter.
The most recent complaint goes a bit deeper. It's about how paper.li redirects ad revenue to paper.li's ad content instead of the original publisher.
I like to use paper.li because it automatically aggregates what the people I'm following are reading and I read my own front page that it creates for me every day. I see stuff I wouldn't otherwise see because I don't have time to click on the tweeter's link that was posted.
It also organizes the tweets by topic, although that clearly needs more work. I find it rather odd what gets put where some days. Organization of tweets and links by hashtag are the most valuable to me. Other tabs are not clearly as good.
I don't like the tabs, because I'd rather scroll through one long page than use tabs (it's quicker or at least feels that way).
I don't worry about ad content. Paper.li provides a valuable service, and for that, I'm willing to put up with their ads. They are at least pertinent. Also, if I want all the details on an article, when I click through, I'll get the original ads that were posted with the article. Paper.li doesn't usually include the full content of a post unless its mostly a graphic or video. In that case, I suppose there might be an issue for creators of rich media content, but that's not typically an issue for most of what I read.
I like what Paper.li does for this blog-site, for my twitter presence, and for my readers. What do you think about it?
paper.li a great web app of 2010, but when everyone following uses it, it can seem a bit saturated.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that paper.li gives you a custom single page of links your followers Tweet. But how are they cultivated and curated? I tweet a dozen or so links in a day, how does paper.li decide which to add to your daily? It doesn't share them all.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I think you confuse my blog post on ad revenue. It's not about you paying paper.li, it's about paper.li making money off content that someone else created. This isn't about you, it's about the original content creators. Paper.li is stripping away their revenue form that content by re-purposing it. Now, this may not see, like your problem, until the content creator decides they're losing too much content and either blocks paper.li or goes to a subscription-only model.
My biggest issue is that, as you say, it's content for your readers. Paper.li is decuding which content to pull into your Daily, not you. It's like having a robot blogger, doesn't that sound less valuable than content you created or curated?
p.s. thanks for the link love.
p.s. I find it curious that you require approval of all comments before they go up on your blog, but you rely on paper.li to automatically generate content for you with the only oversight being that you follow someone.
ReplyDeleteThe bar I set for following someone is much higher than the one I set for commenting on this blog. See Policies.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that: If you comment on a recent post, it doesn't require any pre-approval or even an identity. I used to forbid anonymous posts because of spam, and at one point even had a pre-authorization requirement, but new features in Blogger make that less of an issue.
If you comment on an older post, I do use pre-authorization. I find that spammers frequently comment on older posts and I don't like blog spam.
@mdurwin On your first post (which showed up in my e-mail second):
ReplyDeleteI didn't confuse your point, but perhaps I didn't make myself clear. As a READER of paper.li (I read several of them), I appreciate the aggregation service they provide. There's lots of tweets I don't click on because the tweet itself doesn't tell me enough to determine whether the item is worth reading. So, I don't mind paper.li's ads for the service that it provides me as a reader. I simply ignore them the way I do with most others. In fact, I really appreciate that I can get the first few lines of a story from paper.li without seeing and clicking through an ad (not true the first time I check an @amednews or @HITNewsTweet article).
Yep, I wish I had more control over what paper.li pulls together, and I've commented on that.
If you'll note in my first response: I do "curate" those that I follow. If you want to see the kinds of things that I'm reading and what those I'm following, paper.li is a good way to get a sense of what that group has to say.
So, it's not the best thing around, but it has some value.