In his seminal 1995 work of futurism, Being Digital, MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte coined the term the "Daily Me" to describe a virtual daily newspaper customised to an individual's tastes. It's possible to detect versions of Negroponte's vision in many recent developments, from the "suggested articles" based on your surfing which now appear on many websites, to services such as Paper.li, which selects social media links according to your stated interests. The underlying themes of automation and understanding are also behind the Associated Press's recent announcement that it will start using algorithms created by a company called Automated Insights to generate news stories from raw data, and the furore over a 2012 Facebook study which manipulated the emotional content of users' news feeds.

Truly personal content is unlikely to be automatically generated though – it needs a different kind of thinking. Where the internet actually excels at this is in allowing people to select the stuff that most interests them, and read it in the formats that suit them best. British startup Newspaper Club, which I've covered before, has recently launched a very literal take on the Daily Me, a service called Paper Later which lets you bookmark interesting articles on the web, then prints and delivers them through your letterbox for offline perusal.

Newspaper Club is also a partner of Contributoria, a network for independent journalists which has just published its first issue online and in print, with stories on digital currencies and alternative economies. The Contributoria platform allows writers and editors to collaborate on putting stories together, and then publishes them across a variety of formats. Projects like Contributaria might be the anti-Daily Me, bringing you important stories you didn't know you'd need to read, but the infrastructure required for each is the same: the underlying connections of the web itself.