Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Embracing Today's Technology for Yesterday's Sake


You may have wondered where Brief History went to over the holidays. It certainly wouldn't be the first time an emailed newsletter or blog has suddenly close up shop. But Brief History intends to continue to bring little bits of history to people just as it has since the fall of 2009.

To do that, we're experimenting with some new technology; specifically, paper.li, an online "newspaper" generator. The "newspaper" is currently called Brief History - Illinois with the idea that folks searching for Illinois history will find it easily.

Paper.li advertises that it helps people curate "a personalized newspaper built from articles, blog posts, videos and photos." Most of the content is gathered automatically from Twitter or other online sources that the "publisher" follows. Brief History - Illinois derives it's content from Tweets posted by organizations or individuals that K8sBriefHistory follows. This is not a personal Twitter account, but strictly a way to follow organizations that are dedicated to preserving and sharing history. Paper.li publishers can also manually edit the paper to weed out any unrelated content to keep the information offered to you as useful and interesting as possible.

The next step is to get more local historical societies to post their content online so it can be found and curated! It has been a big stumbling block since Brief History was started that it's so hard to get news about wonderful local events before they happen so we can tell people about them. But we'll continue to do our best to share that information with you.

So take a look at Brief History - Illinois at this link: http://paper.li/K8sBriefHistory/1326909766. Since this is a new format, we'd love to know whether it works for you or not. Please feel free to forward your comments to kate@gnuventures.net. Thanks so much!

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