Help Forums/How to and Tips/About Paper.li

What is Paper.li?

Kelly Hungerford
posted this on April 13, 2011 12:54

What is Paper.li? ( pay-per-lee)

Paper.li is a micro publishing platform that enables you to become Editor-in-Chief of your own news site and publish newspapers based on topics of interest to you. 


What is online content curation? 

Simply put, online content curation is the organizing, filtering, presenting and sharing of the most relevant digital content for a specific audience. Good digital content curation requires both technology and people working together in order to surface relevant content. A content curation platform can never replace the expertise of the human content curator. 
In fact, we believe that people (and not machines) are the ones qualified to make that final selection of content needed in order to identify the content that matters most to them, and for their audiences. We also think that these same people can greatly help their own communities to find their way through this “massive content world” we live in. 

Why should I make a Paper.li? 

We believe that the act of content curation and filtering content for specific audiences is strongly tied to the future of content.  Millions of people are sharing content daily through social media channels and the numbers are growing, making it increasingly difficult to find, organize, share, discover and enjoy.
With the help of semantic analysis we can help you to make sense out of your content. When your content makes sense to you, it can also make sense to a lot of other like minded people, and sharing and discovery becomes easier, more valuable and a lot of fun. 
Every day, around the world, millions of articles are featured on Paper.lis, benefiting millions of readers. You are helping to transform the way information will be organized, discovered and shared in the future. 
Besides all of that, Paper.li is a simple and easy way to create an online newspaper around a favorite topic or passion. Paper.li is used by tens of thousands of people and organizations on a daily basis to share passions, create awareness around events or crisis, build communities, promote businesses or ideas, document current events, or even act as a teacher's helper in the classroom. To get an idea of Paper.li at work, visit our Community blog.  

How does Paper.li work? 

Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account can log-in and create a paper. We provide you with easy to use tools to select your content. You choose your content streams and can create queries and searches based on Twitter users, #tags, keywords, Facebook, your own Twitter timeline, Google+ users, RSS feeds and more.
After you have chosen your sources, we go to work. Behind the scenes, it goes something like this: 

  • we extract all tweets that include URLs based on your content selection

  • we extract the content found on these URLs:

    • text, e.g. blog post, newspaper article

    • photo, e.g. Flickr, yfrog, Twitpic, ...

    • video, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, ...

  • analyze the extracted text for language ( EN, ES...) and for topic, e.g. Politics, Technology, ...

  • surface the day's most relevant articles (using paper.li magic)

  • construct a newspaper frontpage using the filtered articles, photos and videos

Please note: Currently Facebook and Twitter are seen as two separate accounts by Paper.li. This means papers created under one account will only show under paper settings for that account. If you create a Paper.li under your Facebook account, it will not be visible in your Paper Settings when you are logged in under your Twitter account. And vice versa. We are working to change this.
I’ve created a Paperli, now what? 

Direct readers to your Paper.li URL or to your publishers profile so they can discover your interests and share them.  We help you promote your Paper.li via Twitter, Facebook  and email invites. Your Paper.li can even be embedded on your site or blog, allowing a wider audience to discover your interests. 


How does Paper.li affect search engine rankings and affect SEO?

Articles on Paper.li are optimized for SEO. We link to all the sources used. Our main focus is optimizing for social sharing, which is the fastest growing way that readers are discovering content.

What are you doing to give credit where credit is due?

Every day news spotters and publishers are helping millions of content creators to be discovered.  We appreciate and value the entire publishing value chain and everyone should get recognition:  publishers, news spotters and the site or author of the content. 

Publisher: the publisher ( curator of the information) gets recognized for their work each time they tweet, post or share their link with the world. 
News Spotter: is recognized for the great content they shared, or pointed out each time their @user is mentioned in a manual or automatic promo tweet. As well we show each spotter responsible for sharing that information for your edition.
Note: we attribute the 1st news spotter that shared the link for your edition period, not the 1st person who ever shared that link!
Site or Author of content: we always link the reader back to the original source content so that site and author gets the traffic driven back to their site. 

What about mentions and @replies on Twitter. Am I spamming my followers?

We believe that recognition to everyone involved in the curation process is important, and we let you decide if you will tweet automatically, or manually.

If you chose to promote your paper automatically, we will help you by selecting mentions for your News Spotters for that edition. If you chose to promote your Paper.li manually, you easily modify the tweet and choose your own News Spotter mentions and text for that edition.

On automatic promotional tweets, we have a 48 hour " one tweet policy" in place:  no News Spotter will be mentioned more than once with a 48 hour period. This is to make certain that mentions don't get out of control. 

What if News Spotters don't want to be mentioned? 

Two ways:
1. Any News Spotter that does not want to be mentioned can send us a tweet @newscrier. They will automatically be blacklisted and will no longer be mentioned in promo tweets. 
2. If a news spotter wants to be mentioned in general on Paper.li, but not for a specific Paper.li, they can contact the Paper.li owner and ask to be placed on their "blocked news spotters" list. Of they can contact us and we an do it for them. 
What if blogger or content provider doesn't want his or her content to be published? 

It's true that we cannot control Tweepers from sharing great content that they find, but we can control if it shows up for discovery on the pages of a Paper.li.
Any site owner that does not want their work to be discovered on the pages of a Paper.li can contact us and ask to be blacklisted. We will make sure that the URL of their site is never published again on the pages of a Paper.li 

What does it cost?  A desire for discovery!  Otherwise, it's free!
 
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