I have a couple of ‘newspapers’ that I use through Paper.li and they get automatically tweeted out every day. I think Paper.li is a great service, but I think some people use it flippantly and it can sometimes flood the twitter stream. Surely a person has the freedom to use the Paper.li as they like, but I have found it much more useful when used to build community for the benefit of others.

I created two papers that post daily. One is HomeSpun Faith and the other is HomeSpun Homeschool.

These papers are created based on two of my Twitter lists, including a few hashtags that I want to have Paper.li pull in. I placed certain people in my Twitter lists so that their tweets will publish in my papers. I can edit my Twitter lists at any time if I see that a person is sharing tweets that don’t really apply to my papers. For example, if a person’s tweets are always giveaways or coupons I may place them on a different list, because I want my faith and homeschool papers to be specifically about faith and homeschool. This means I am watching people on twitter to see what kind of quality tweets they are sharing. If a person is only self promoting their own stuff via a bot that they most likely have added to their blog then I will end up removing them.

For me, Twitter and Paper.li is about developing community and helping all of us as a whole and the best Twitter folks are the ones who share a variety of links that are pertinent to the community.

When the Papers are published, my account will auto tweet the link along with a few other Twitter handles of people who sent out links. I do not choose which names get added to that announcement. The Paper.li chooses those and I’m pretty sure it’s random. So while I have received some ‘thank yous’, the thanks goes to Paper.li, but a special thanks goes to those who I have on my lists. So thank you all for tweeting good information that benefits the whole community.

A few other papers I subscribe to that are worth keeping an eye on are:

• The #Blogging Daily
• Unschooling Homeschool Zine
• Organic Church

What is a quality tweet that can get you on my lists?

If you tweet about home education I am looking for tweets that share links to informative articles about homeschooling. It need not be a faith based homeschool article, as long as the tweets are helpful to the community as a whole. If you are in the habit of tweeting out divisive articles that pit one blogger or homeschool vendor against another I will not add you to my list.

For the faith list I keep an eye on people who share inspiration, grace, and thought provoking articles to challenge us to grow and walk by faith. I don’t favor one denomination over another so this is a pretty diverse list of Christian flavors.

Occasionally I will see a tweet on one of my papers that doesn’t quite fit my preferences, but that’s because I can’t control what people are tweeting. If you see something that isn’t your taste, don’t click on it. Simple as that.

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