WNBA Paper.li – All the WNBA news in one place

I have created a new daily paper.li for WNBA news. Why a #WNBA page? Two reasons. The @PhoenixMercury made it to the Western Conference Finals and I wanted to try out paper.li’s service.

What’s Paper.li?

It is a site that gathers all the stories tweeted with a particular hashtag from around the web. (In this case, the hashtag #WNBA.)  Paper.li automatically goes through the links posted with that hashtag and finds the original stories published in the last 24 hours. It pulls them together in a “Front page” of stories and images. (You can get to the full list of articles and posts mentioned with the #WNBA hashtag from the top of the paper.li page.) Once the stories are pulled together, the page is published and shared daily.

You can set up to get notified by email when the daily issue is available. Since Amplify lets me create posts by email, I have a notification set to be sent daily to my Amplify posting address. This way, when the new issue is available, it gets automatically shared with Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the web.

You can also create paper.li pages from Twitter lists and individual Twitter members and their followers.I plan to create a list one to test that functionality out soon, but don’t know what list to use yet.

I learned about paper.li from several of my friends over at Amplify… There are a couple of people there who have created paper.li pages which re-publish content curated and created on Amplify. I like this use of the site. I also like the flexibility of the entire process.

Creating a paper.li page is straight forward.

Create an account (or log in if you already have one). At the upper right of your page, there is a link to “create a newspaper”. Click that link and complete the source information for your paper.li. If the term or list is already being tracked, you will be taken to that term’s page. If not, you will see a page indicating that the content is being curated. Once the content is pulled together, the new page will be created.

If the item you want to follow has not content, you will be told that and prompted to come back tomorrow. This happened when I tried to create one for OneNote. It seems that people share on OneNote, but don’t hashtag the information. If the page starts to populate, I will start to share it more. (If you want to see the empty page for yourself, you can find it at http://paper.li/tag/onenote#)

My thoughts

So far, the page looks interesting. It seems to be catching the big stories. I don’t think it is catching everything… It didn’t add my story from this weekend, even after it was tweeted. I don’t know if it will catch this one.

The ability to curate content based off of Twitter links is a great idea. I miss the ability to connect and hold a conversation there on the page, but I understand why the company decided to go that way. They see the site as a content consuming site, not a content creation site.

If you have a paper.li you recommend, let me know in the comments.