For the last couple of months, I've been checking out a couple of free Twitter mash ups which automatically generate a daily online newspaper culled from the tweets of your followers and organised into different themes.
The Twitter Tim.es has an RSS feed attached to it and so I can star interesting links in my Google Reader account and see who has retweeted the post too.
e.g http://twittertim.es/joedale/rss.xml
Paper.li works in a slightly different way and notifies you of the latest issue via email. Clicking on the link provided takes you to your own personalised newspaper with stories, live links, video clips and images organised in different themed sections ... like a real newspaper!
Always an interesting read, I find it an ideal way of catching up with some of the main headlines from my Twitter stream for that day. The site lets you subscribe to others' papers too. Mine can be found at http://paper.li/joedale if you fancy a look.
I was thinking also that the MFL Twitterati could create their own foreign language newspaper full of authentic resources for use in lessons by following a dedicated Twitter account MFLTimes and tweeting in French, German, Spanish etc about the topics they are currently covering. They may prefer to create a new account for this experiment to ensure a consistent approach and avoid the inclusion of their normal tweets which may be off-topic.
On the other hand, languages teachers could just follow @MFLTimes with their normal account and generate an MFL related newspaper based on their tweets instead. It would seem if they use the hashtag #MFLTimes, their tweets are more likely to be included in the final copy.
Please note I've protected the tweets on MFLTimes to avoid spam follows and the potential of inappropriate content featuring! As a result though, a dialogue box asking for login details will appear when you first visit paper.li/MFLTimes so just remember to click Cancel and you'll be fine.
Worth a try? Follow MFLTimes and we'll see what happens!
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