Charles Apple

a) All the weaknesses and shortcomings of Twitter. Combined with b) The worst of trying-too-hard-to-emulate-newspapers web design and c) The downside of once-a-day print delivery.

Yes, that’s Paper.li. Its motto:

Read a Twitter stream as a daily newspaper

Never mind why would you want to. You just can. Apparently, that’s enough in the new world of news media.

Here’s what it looks like:

No, a Twitter stream is probably best read as a Twitter stream. Because a longer form narrative — such as one would expect in “a daily newspaper” — would require, y’know, more than 140 goddamned characters per sentence.

So sign up for the free application — and grant it access to your Twitter account — so Paper.li can take several minutes to chase down various links from your your own posts and from folks you follow on Twitter.

In the meantime, Paper.li gives you this placeholder page to look at:

The cute part, of course: The little printing presses are animated. Awww.

So finally, the virtual wheels stop turning and you’re given a web page that looks something like this:

The tag cloud at upper right is totally worthless, of course, as are most tag clouds. The “curator’s live stream” directly beneath is simply the same thing you’d see on my Twitter page. Except you get less content here, of course.

The main stories up top — in what is presumably the “news” section — mostly are excerpts of my own blog posts, which I thought was rather cool. Until I realized that one comes from the VizEds‘ Ning site’s direct Twitter feed and one landed there as a result of a retweet from Bill Pitzer. The rest are simply links that are stripped from folks I follow.

And the same falls down through the Paper.li page, grouped roughly into categories that I apparently have no real control over. Of course, between these sections are Google ads.

Which, I’m certain, is the real purpose behind Paper.li. They’re simply trying to repackage free content from Twitter as a vehicle to place Google ads. Smart, in a way. But also stupid, too, because when you ask a robot to aggregate, group and edit, the results usually look and read like something a robot would do.

That’s certainly the case here. I’d think that anyone with knowledge of elementary web page design and a set of good rss feeds could set up something that produces better results than this. Much like all those really horrible “infographics” that are popping up all over the ‘net, this is a prime example of an idea that’s all visual gimmick and no real useful substance.

On the other hand, I probably would have said the same thing about Facebook, when it first came out. That, of course, would have been before I recognized Facebook’s value as a delivery medium for list memes and Farmville spam. (Note: This is sarcasm.)

One thing I like: The typography and white space used by Paper.li reminds me a lot of the clean design you see at the New York Times and Washington Post web sites, which are the news sites I find easiest to read and to navigate (as opposed to nearly anything by Gannett, Tribune or McClatchy web divisions).

I’m not saying the Paper.li page is easy to navigate. I’m saying it smells and feels, at first glance, like news sites I know to be easy to navigate.

Also, I like the fact that Paper.li says it’ll rotate my content every day. Paper.li will send me an e-mail Friday night when my next “edition” is ready. Perhaps, over time, the folks at Paper.li will tweak their system so it can deliver new “editions” more often, which is what I’d prefer. Otherwise, I’m reading old news. Like I said: Worst of both worlds and all that.

Perhaps they’ll also set up their system so that stories and links aren’t repeated across the same “newspaper page.” (Do I really need to see my own Apple vs. Adobe and my Naughty Geeks posts listed twice each? I don’t think so.)

Find Paper.li here. I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to pull up the “newspaper” I “created.” Try this link and see what you think.

Thanks to Nicole Bogdas for the tip.

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UPDATE

Gotta give ‘em credit, though. That rotating feed at the upper right includes negative comments as well as positive ones:

Heh…

I’ve neglected to post about it the past two weeks, but we’ve been doing this regularly now on Tuesday nights: using Twitter as a chatroom.

It’s a bit odd to use Twitter that way. But a large — and growing — number of visual editors are on Twitter every day. So it makes good sense to take VizEds to where its audience is.

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HOW TO JOIN US

If you’d like to join us, tonight, look for the chat hashtag:

#vizedschat

Make sure to include that in anything you say tonight. If you don’t, most of the chatters won’t see it.

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TONIGHT’S TOPIC

As usual, our moderator is Jim McBee. Jim tells us that tonight, Robb Montgomery has suggested we discuss options for possibly taking Visualeditors off of Ning.

You might recall, VizEds has been a Ning social networking site for a little more than two years. VizEds started out in 2004 as a bulletin board site. A couple of weeks ago when Ning announced it was changing the way it runs its business, Robb assured me it wouldn’t affect VizEds. So this surprises me. You now know as much about this as I do.

Of course, there are a lot of folks who drop by just to say hello or to talk about other things. That’s OK, too. I think it’s fair to say there aren’t a lot of rules in the VizEds chat.

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WHAT TIME?

We’ll begin around…

• 9 p.m. Eastern time
• 8 p.m. Central time
• 7 p.m. Mountain time
• 6 p.m. Pacific time

…and we go until we get tired.

For those of you who have never chatted with Twitter, here are a couple of tips…

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TWEET CHAT TIP NO. 1

Be advised that when you chat on Twitter, you’re broadcasting your chat to not just the folks in our virtual “chatroom,” but to all your Twitter followers. If you post a lot, you could swamp your tweeps with messages that they find awfully baffling.

Therefore, allow me to suggest: Open up a second account on Twitter. Use your regular Twitter account every day. Use the new account just for chatting.

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TWEET CHAT TIP NO. 2

Another suggestion: Don’t try to chat in the usual Twitter window. Instead, go to TweetChat — a site that’s very easy to use:

Not only will this site update your window automatically — no more hitting “refresh” every 20 seconds — it’ll also add that hashtag automatically.

You’ll be amazed how smoothly this works and how much like an old-fashioned chatroom it seems.

Find an unedited transcript of last week’s chat here.

I’ve been hearing lots and lots (and lots) of bellyaching about the lack of rights by creators — us — at Facebook.

Well, forget that. Here’s a Twitter horror tale that’ll get your attention…

Photo District News reported Tuesday that Daniel Morel — a Haitian photojournalist and former shooter for the Associated Press — was in Port au Prince in January when the gigantic earthquake struck there.

David Walker of PDN reports:

Within an hour, the daughter of a friend helped him post 13 high resolution images on Twitter from a hotel that still had a working internet connection.

AFP downloaded the images and distributed them through Getty, it’s distribution partner. Morel’s iconic image of an earthquake victim appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the world the next day.

Here’s the the shot to which Walker refers:

I find only three U.S. papers that used the picture on A1:

However, a lot of papers around the world used the picture out front that day, Thursday, Jan. 14. A sampling from the Newseum:

Walker continues:

In many cases, the images carried the credit of AFP, Getty, and a Dominican photographer who stole Morel’s images and re-tweeted them as his own. (Morel says AFP knew who the images actually belonged to, a claim AFP does not seem to be disputing).

Sure enough, all three of the U.S. papers you see above listed someone other than Morel in the credit line:

Morel sent “cease and desist” notices to AFP, which stopped distributing the images. Since then, Morel has sought payment for his work.

But then AFP sued, Morel, claiming right of free redistribution of anything uploaded to Twitter.

Walker reports:

Morel’s response in court papers to that he “had no prior experience with Twitter…and did not read the Terms of Service.”

D’oh!

Walker also points out that the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press did see the pictures on Twitter and offered Morel a fee for using them.

Lesson learned: If you upload pictures to TwitPic (or Facebook or Flickr), then this could be you.

Find the complete Photo District News story here.

View several more of Morel’s Haitian earthquake photos at Corbis.

Thanks to Jim Romenesko for linking to this today.