Daisies and Shit A Daisies and Shit Production

Blogging the News

I often rely on my favorite bloggers to act as a news aggregation service of sorts, to deliver the interesting happenings of the day to me in tight little bundles, complete with commentary.  I go through a number of more traditional news sources most days as well, of course, but I appreciate the filter that is applied with blogged news - I follow the bloggers I do, in large part, because they're interested in the same sorts of things I'm interested in, so the news they blog about also tends to be the sorts of news I'm interested in.  In fact, what first attracted me to blogging was the potential for spreading the word about news that I found interesting along with my related opinions and comments.

Reality, however, is a bitch and I've learned over the last couple of years that blogging bits of news requires a couple of skills I simply don't possess:

First and foremost - posting frequency.  For example, it's not unusual for Joe.My.God. to publish 50 posts a freakin' day.  I can't regularly manage 50 posts a month.  It's current events that matter when blogging bits of news.  Nobody cares what I think about that thing that happened three weeks ago

Secondly - succinctness.  When I do manage to blog about something current, I generally find myself wanting to either simply Tweet a link to an article or write up a "proper" blog post... which often takes me so long that I wind up not posting it at all because I no longer feel it's relevant.  Tweeting article links is all well and good, especially as it posts to my Facebook as well, but I really prefer the "one stop shopping" that blogging bits of news gives.

As it turns out, Freethought blogger Al Stefanelli recently published a blog post that clued me in to a little service that just might allow me to pass on those little bits of news that catch my eye without violating my intrinsic nature.  Paper.li is a service that allows users to publish their own internet newspaper cobbled together from sources of their own choosing.  Each addition also allows for a bit of personal commentary via Editor's Note, and a discussion corner.  Most importantly, given my nature, publishing an article to the next addition of my paper is as simple as clicking a link on my browser bar and checking a couple of options.

It's possible my little fledgling paper will die of neglect in less than a month, but for now, the Daisies and Shit Daily is set to publish, somewhat ironically, twice daily (morning and evening).  I will continue to use the free version of the service until I'm reasonably convinced that it's fit enough to survive.  As always, comments and suggestions are more than welcome!