My parents have no desire to jump on the social media bandwagon and become avid users of Facebook and Twitter. As much as many 20-somethings would rejoice at not having to be "friends" with their mother and father, the reluctance of my parents proved to be a bit of a problem for me. You see, I utilize social networks to amplify the content that I write for my clients. My parents would like to read such content, but don't want to go to the social networks to read them. "Can't you just email the links to us," they ask. Unfortunately, no. Some days, I have multiple articles coming out at different times of the day. I also don't have the time to remember to send things to them specially. I don't need another thing on my To Do list. Fortunately, Paper.li, this week's Tech Tool of the Week, solved my problem.
Paper.li is a content curation service, where folks can publish their own daily papers by using the tons and tons of content shared on Twitter. Create a paper based on the articles shared by the people you follow, or create a more topical newspaper by curating content on certain hashtags. The Five-0 Redux Daily is a good example of the latter, curating content revolving around the new hit drama, Hawaii Five-0. You can even create a paper that curates the content of only a few specific followers, which is what I did for my parents.
Since, I already tweet the stuff that I write, creating a newspaper of my tweets, and my tweets only, proved to be the solution that makes my parents, and myself, happy. The online newspaper comes directly to them via email, through a communication method that they already use regularly. It includes all the links to the articles that I've written, as well as those that I've simply shared. Since it comes everyday (Paper.li allows you to set the frequency of your paper), my parents get anywhere from one to four articles in each issue, which doesn't take a whole lot of their time to go through. I've been doing this for about a week now, and so far everything seems to be working out fine.
Folks can have other reasons to set up their own newspaper (heard it's a good way to get some of those people you follow to follow you back), but if you're a freelancer who wants to direct your content to a few select people, may I suggest Paper.li, this week's Tech Tool of the Week?
RNG-esus
Musings of a Random World