Expect No Benefits From paper.li

It happens every day or two, whether I’m sending a tweet about my own blog post, or sharing something interesting I’ve found elsewhere. A few minutes after my own tweet, I’ll get referenced in a reply. The article I tweeted has been aggregated by someone’s paper.li site. Unlike most backlinks, I expect no benefits from paper.li.

The idea is interesting

paper.li touts itself as a service for creating your own newspaper website. You can set topics, pull in stories, and publish a “daily newspaper” around the subject matter you want. All the stories are pulled together into a newspaper-look design, and published.

Nice idea. Removes the barriers to entry for publishing news, current events and opinion, whatever your area of interest.

The implementation is poor

paper.li doesn’t know what it is. That lack of focus means it fails across the board.

It isn’t an effective aggregator

If I set various keywords and let paper.li search, it’ll come up with a full list of articles to populate my site. It’ll categorize them…kind of accurately. It’ll pull in items of no real interest, and leave out other items that might be “on topic” but miss a vital keyword.

If I want to look at aggregated recent articles on a certain topic, there are a multitude of services out there which are more effective. They’re more effective in pulling in the initial aggregation, but they also give me more power to further refine my search.

It isn’t an effective newspaper

A good newspaper isn’t just an aggregation of all the latest stories. Newspapers are a powerful medium; whether online or offline, because the stories they gather are curated. Curating the content means that topics of importance are effectively highlighted. Less relevant pieces are reduced in prominence or discarded altogether.

A newspaper that’s created automatically isn’t really a newspaper, and doesn’t work.

It isn’t an effective traffic driver

I’d like to see some statistics on paper.li traffic. I know that the web content I create has been referenced multiple times, on multiple people’s paper.li sites. I can’t remember ever seeing analytics that suggest any of those links has brought traffic back to my site.

That trend seems to continue regardless of whether the story is featured prominently on the paper.li site or not, or whether the paper.li publisher has tens of thousands of Twitter followers. It leads me to wonder whether  individual paper.li sites have any significant visitor numbers.

Better to do one thing well

If you want to read an aggregation of content based on your interests, there are good options. iGoogle, Yahoo or MSN personal homepages. They all let you set topics and bring in aggregated content based on searches and keywords.

If you want to curate your own collection of content more actively then use an RSS aggregator like Google Reader. Choose the feeds that you want to sign up to. Categorize and sort them. Check in daily.

If you want to highlight great articles for others, share them on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks. Write articles on your site that link to that external content. Show that you’re not just recommending something that was automatically aggregated, but something that you’ve read and rated yourself.

Do you think that paper.li has any strong benefits? Are there better alternative services for this kind of thing?

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