#5291
For those of us who remember the single-line BBS (bulletin board systems) of the early 1980s, back when MS-DOS 2.11 was king, and a 1200 baud modem was an upgrade, today’s instant communications on the Internet seems almost miraculous.
Email didn’t exist back then.
But you could leave a message for someone else who used the same BBS system, disconnect, and check back in a day or two for a reply.
Times have certainly changed. Today, between email and Twitter, we can get real-time updates from hundreds of friends in a continual flow of information across our desktops.
The problem is, keeping up.
Particularly with Twitter, which can easily send you thousands of `tweets’ in a single day.
I use a small app (Echofon) added into my Firefox browser that handles tweets very well, holding them in a queue until I choose to view them.
While that helps enormously, I still miss out on a lot of valuable content that streams from those that I follow. Articles and blogs that I really would like to follow up and read, but haven’t the time to click and read as they come across my twitter app.
A couple of months ago I mentioned the Emergency Management (EM) Daily, a `twitter newspaper’ created using paper.li.
Every 24 hours this paper is electronically published, with highlights and links to the best content `tweeted’ by those followed by @AllHandsDotNet, which is the twitter account for http://www.all-hands.net.
Each edition is apt to have a couple of hundred linked articles, easily arranged into 8 or 9 broad categories for quick viewing.
This twitter newspaper has been a godsend, enabling me to go back and pick up on information I had missed. I’ve since added 5 more daily Twitter newspapers to my reading list, and hope to discover more over time.
These genre based newspapers are a terrific way to quickly scan the wealth of content published online over the previous 24 hours.
In addition to The EM Daily, I also read:
As shared by 93 people on Cesar Sanchez’s Twitter list
As shared by 118 people on Liz Ditz’s Twitter list
As shared by MicrobiologyBytes + 33 followed people on Twitter
As shared by Rene F. Najera, MPH + 77 followed people on Twitter
As shared by 212 people on FAO Media Centre’s Twitter list
You can search for newspapers that cover topics you may be interested in at http://paper.li/, and yes, you can create your own online newspaper as well.
If you are looking for a better way to keep track of the avalanche of information that flows continually across the twitterverse, pick a couple of papers that cater to your interests, and give it a go.
Just as with your Twitter feed, the quality and reliability of the information in these newspapers will depend upon the quality and reliability of the people they follow.
So examine the list of each paper’s daily contributors, and choose your Daily Newspapers wisely.
And as always, Caveat Lector.
