Are Paper.li Tweets Spam?

from here

As I get the hang of Twitter, social media and all of this, I'm still learning my way around the netiquette of (frankly) everything.

This is the thing that has always scared me off of Facebook and Twitter to date, that even as a member of "the Facebook Generation," none of this is intuitive to me. I dislike frictionless sharing, I don't care what you ate for breakfast, or that you miss your babies (by which, you mean your dogs). I hate abbreviations and text speak (FTW!), and don't want to see a picture of how you look to yourself in the bathroom mirror.

So as I've begun to use Twitter to connect with other people interested in the things I'm interested (I have separate feeds in Hootsuite for baseball, books, friends, and the NYTimes free that gives me my news fix), I'm increasingly interested in what is and isn't acceptable in these forums.

In that vein, I don't know what to make of the paper.li tweets that periodically show up with my name attached. If there was a person deciding that my writing is one of their "top stories," I'd be flattered. Knowing that there is not, that this is a machine collecting anything published under hash-tag "whatever," I find I'm annoyed by it.

How annoyed should I be? I don't really know.

I know there are ways to opt out. Is it worth the effort? Are these mentions trolling for traffic from me showing up in my follower's feeds? Or is it just reaching me?

I know from visiting a couple of these sites that have tweeted about my work that my article is not particularly easy to find, even when I am a "top story." On the other hand, all publicity is good publicity, right? And links from outside sites impact where your blog ends up in Google searches, so is this auto-tweet spam just a side effect I should tolerate?