A few years ago an old friend turned me on to Twitter. Before long I was experimenting with other media of the so-called “social” variety. I not only tweeted, I retweeted. I blogged. In May 2010, I posted a different cycling-related music video every day for 31 days of National Bike Month.
I had joined the conversation. I tried most every new thing I could find to see how it might be used in journalism and marketing communications. It was fun.
Somewhere along the line I found paper.li, which collected tweets from various sources and published them together as an “online newspaper” that I called On the Move.
If that link no longer works, that means I went through with my plan to kill On the Move. (If it’s working, it won’t be for long.)
Why did it need to die?
Two reasons.
1. I just read a Slate piece about how easy it has become to fool some of the people who pass for journalists in the e-world. By essentially forwarding hundreds or thousands of links through a service like paper.li, without checking each one for integrity, it is way too easy to pass along bad information. There’s too much unedited clutter out there already. The word “babel” comes to mind.
2. Without realizing it, I had become what paper.li and others incorrectly call a “curator,” a word so overused and misused that it is losing its real meaning.
Look it up, in a real dictionary.
The Smith Compound 