Most people add just about anybody and everybody to their Twitter account. Not being into tweeting about my breakfast and emotions (actually, being a more private person than may be the norm these days, but that’s just me), my list of Twitter followees is small but (IMHO) high class. I only follow people who tweet exclusively or mostly about journalism and media.
Now, I’m seeing one of the payoffs of this strategy through the still-alpha online service paper.li. It takes from my tweets (which in turn come from this www.newsplexer.org blog) and the tweets of those I follow – and I think from a level more, the folks they follow, but with an algorithm that assigns decreasing priority the farther it gets from patient zero – me). The real weighting is kind of Googlesque, looking for things that lots of people in my circle-on-circle of followees have all tweeted or retweeted, figuring that the more the folks in this group mention them, the more on topic they are for me. Then it creates an online newspaper-style presentation of that stuff focused in my area of interest and contribution. See http://paper.li/newsplexer. At first I used this mostly as simply an alternative Twitter reader that helped me drill down quickly to just the tweets in my circle of followees that really mattered to me, because even they go off topic sometimes and understandably have interests that diverge from mine. We’re all individuals, after all. I found paper.li to be pretty good at figuring out what among all those many tweets per day I really cared about, better I think than its competitor and predecessor, The Twitter Times (http://twittertim.es/newsplexer). There just always seemed to be more meat on paper.li’s bones. I often didn’t even look at my own Twitter feed, just at paper.li’s mashup of it. (Aesthetically, I think paper.li looks more inviting, also. Does it need to be newspaperesque in style? No, but it works, for me at least.) But now a couple of things have happened. First, it appears that my circle of followees has expanded from the couple of dozen that I started my personal paper.li with to 70+, which seems to be a more suitable critical mass for this service. Second, paper.li’s developers have continued to tweak the algorithms and functions of the service so that it successfully seeks out more of the source material and media that I and my Twitter followees and their followees are tweeting and blogging about rather than presenting just their tweets and their connected blog entries. The result is that The Newsplexer Daily has become something I now consider to have possible value for more than just me. It’s become a product in its own right. And in almost pure single-minded journalistic fashion, all I had to do was stay focused on the topic. Maybe in this age of eclecticism, that focus becomes one of the things that identifies a journalist among the masses?