UKCLE Daily News

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Twitter is great for short messages (140 characters or less), sharing urls, interesting links, images, etc, etc, but sometimes it would be nice to see more than a very short exerpt or have to follow the link to find out what its really all about - after all, how many abstracts of 140 words have you read that don't really sum up the actual paper?!

Welcome to paper.li, a new service that came out in March 2010 for absolutely anyone, whether a twitter user or not, that creates a newspaper style production:

"Twitter is currently a simple and fast way to point others to content of interest on the web. Twitter users do so millions of times a day, effectively giving their followers a glimpse of what they think others should see or read. Next to having followers, any Twitter thus follows others, generally a group of people they deem of interest and want to keep track of what they have to share. Any Twitter user is thus a kind of editor in chief, with the people they follow being trusted journalists. The sum of what is shared by them is thus a unique perspective of what is deemed of interest on the web on any given day. A bit like a newspaper.

Having a list of links that are being shared on a given day by a user and those he/she follows is not enough. We analyze all links for topic (Politics, science, technology...) using semantic text analysis tools, extract the content (text, video, images, pdf, ...) and rank them for probable pertinence. With all of that info we are then able to create a newspaper front page. If such quick scanning is not enough, you are also able to access a table view of all links shared in the last 24 hours by a user and those he/she follows."

As an example, the @HEA_UKCLE twitter feed follows over 300 other twitter users - they all tweet very interesting stuff but we can't always share it all with you.  Rather than re-tweeting the good bits, and still having the problems mentioned earlier of being restricted to 140 characters and no visual images, the UKCLE Daily is a collection of topics and content that paper.li has sorted and organised for us automatically:

But, there are downsides to using this type of automatically-generated-content gadgetry: where's the editorial control?  Here are the issues:

• Our account (@hea_ukcle) is the editor-in-chief - therefore all the accounts we follow, are our 'trusted journalists'.  Therefore, we need to make sure we trust the content they tweet about.
• Topics - will paper.li identify and organise the relevant topics that we want?  Education and #law are probably relevant, but really we want the nexus between the two.
• Likewise, 'probable pertinence' sounds highly technical, but also a little vague and dubious!  Surely paper.li needs to know what we would consider pertient, not what is popular or of interest to the world at large.
• Daily is quite frequent - twitter is all about the here-and-now - and whilst this provides a reasonable overview of the day's content

Perhaps some things for paper.li to consider:

• Would a weekly round-up be attractive?  A smaller list of accounts that are more trustworthy might not generate enough content for a daily newspaper.
• Can we augment the 'probable pertience'?  If I could delete one or two things from each daily newspaper, would the software be able to 'learn' from my choice of what not to include?
• How about defining what topics we would like for our Daily news?  That way I could keep out the interesting but less relevant 'Arts and Entertainment' section.

There is a greater degree of editorial control but restricting the Daily news to one of the twitter lists that an account holder has made.  As an example, I've created a paper from the twitter accounts of other HEA subject centres and other related higher education sources:

This version is less about law and legal education, but is quite neatly tailored towards higher education in the UK.  I've also see other users on twitter using this gadget, in particular John Harman's Law Daily from the Director of Media at the College of Law, and the IP and Technology Daily from Andres Guadamuz, aka TechnoLlama at Edinburgh University.

Perhaps we might see greater functionality from paper.li in the future, and a more robustly edited or less frequent newspaper might arise.  In the meantime, feel free to look at the UKCLE Daily, but please note that this is just a pretty way of showing you the content provided by people we follow on twitter:

No endorsement!

No editorial!

No control!