Thursday, June 23, 2011

Paper.li + Instapaper + Kindle = Personalized Magazine

How I Use Paper.Li

I follow quite a lot of people on my Twitter account, so it's inevitable that I end up not seeing every tweet posted by every user. I do, however, have a pretty good idea of what links the people I follow are tweeting thanks to a third-party service called Paper.li.

Paper.li crunches through all the tweets that were posted by the people you follow in 24-hour chunks, and prepares a "paper" or online magazine for you to read the articles that your followings linked to.

For example: the Scientist Artist Collaborations
(a paper.li paper that I found by randomly performing a Twitter search)

What makes paper.li interesting is that it ranks the articles from what it feels is most relevant to least relevant, and it makes the list of articles available in list view aside from "paper" view.

For example: the Scientist Artist Collaborations paper in list view
(which you can get to by clicking the "see all articles" link in the upper right corner of the "paper view")

So whenever I have some down time and want to get caught up on the most interesting articles that my followings have been tweeting about, I head to my own paper in its list view and start clicking through links that I find interesting.

How I use Instapaper

Now that I've got my own private news feed of interesting links, I make a point of reading the first paragraph of every article that I become curious about. If after reading that paragraph I find myself wanting to read more, I add the article to my Instapaper account (whether it's via web or on my iPod).

I've also set up my Instapaper account so that it has my Kindle settings (login required).  It's configured to send any new items I've added in the past 24 hours to my Kindle. It gets to me at no cost because I've opted for free delivery via wifi rather than using the not-free-if-you're-not-in-the-US 3G delivery option.


On the Kindle
Every time Amazon receives the daily feed from Instapaper, they send me an email to let me know that it's available for download. 

When I get that email, I turn on my Kindle's wireless setting and select the Sync to Download Items option. I typically leave the wireless off the rest of the time to save on battery.
Nothing beats the experience of leisurely reading articles that you've personally curated on the Kindle's gorgeous and eye-friendly screen.