Not too long ago, a little Switzerland-based company called Small Rivers launched a site called paper.li. Using information provided in Twitter feeds, paper.li instantly creates online "newspapers" on demand based on a username or a topic (identified by a # symbol).
Laid out very much like a newspaper, typography and all, the site is fairly easy to use and incredibly intriguing.
One of the best things about the site is that it extracts the links that Twitter users include in their tweets and puts them in the newspaper, so when a visitor clicks on a heading, it goes straight to the source and not back to Twitter.
Could the paper.li version of Tucson news, #Tucson Daily, be the next best source of Twitter-based Tucson information?
Quite possibly, if the company is able to take the obvious technological success and market it appropriately. There is no other way currently to get a decent view of the news being spread on Twitter about Tucson, so this is the best we've got right now.
It's pretty relevant, too. Today, topics on the paper "above the fold" included news of the University of Arizona's domestic partner benefits and Rodney Glassman's Senate run announcement. That's timely.
Paper.li is certainly a better way to view data related to a particular search topic than search.twitter.com, which is Twitter's standard search engine. It pulls pictures, excerpts from the original source and is just far more visually interesting because of that.
Is there a real future in Twitter-based newspapers?
Again, quite possibly. Given Twitter's reputation for turbo-propelling information and news, these little online papers have the potential to beat the newspapers to the news.
Check out paper.li and paper.li/tag/Tucson to see what the buzz is all about.
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