NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

Working remotely with good ergonomics

I regularly work remotely at coffeeshops with my laptops and get a lot of questions about my portable ergonomic setup. Here's a list of the components I use:

1. Goldtouch Go! Travel Notebook Stand - I've found this works better and stands slightly taller than this still excellent Logitech Notebook Riser Stand. The Goldtouch also packs down smaller.

2. Goldtouch Go! Travel Keyboard Aluminum - The split keyboard allows for a more natural wrist and shoulder position. I just wish it was slightly smaller, Bluetooth Wireless and had better keyboard layout for Mac users.

3. Apple Magic Mouse - Super graceful scrolling reduces strain.

Run NewsCloud at Rackspace for $45 per month

We've just released an installation script for a $45 monthly Rackspace Cloud account. It also works great on any Ubuntu 10.04 Linux server. If you've been waiting for an affordable hosting solution for NewsCloud, check it out.

Register for the next Democracy School in Seattle June 17th - 18th

Democracy School teaches citizens and activists to reframe exhausting and often discouraging single issue work (such as opposing ill-advised highway projects, stadium funding and corporate tax breaks, or proposing sick leave legislation, bans on toxic chemicals and common sense drug policy, etc.) in a way that we can confront corporate control on a powerful single front: people’s constitutional rights.

Our next Seattle school will focus on activists and organizers interested in helping lead a rights-based movement in Seattle, similar to what Spokane began in 2010. Specifically, graduates of the school will be encouraged to participate in community building efforts to draft a bill of rights for a future Seattle ballot initiative.

Learn more and register at People First

NewsCloud Latest Release Runs on Rails 2.3.11

Read about Release 3.1's migration to Ruby on Rails 2.3.11. Hopefully this will make it a bit easier for developers to try out our code than the earlier version.

News Orgs: Leverage Facebook But Don't Sacrifice Independence

Amy Gahran has a great post inspired by Scott Rosenberg pointing out that news organizations and journalists may be overrelying on Facebook, even giving up ownership of valued real estate and content. Honestly, I've never read a better argument for our Knight-funded open source platform, NewsCloud.

Says Rosenberg, "By moving so much of the conversation away from their own websites and out to Facebook, media companies are basically saying, ‘We did a lousy job of engaging readers under our own roof, so we’re going to encourage it to happen on someone else’s turf.’”

Says Gahran, "I do think news orgs should have a strong presence in the social media that are popular with their communities. But don’t make this an excuse to slack off on adapting your own tools, culture, and systems to engage more effectively on your own digital 'turf.'"

She continues: "The architecture of Facebook is also still mostly a 'walled garden'—much of the content and interaction is not easily or universally findable or linkable. This is appropriate for interpersonal social networking, but it makes less sense from a publisher’s perspective. It can make valuable content associated with your brand harder to find, track, and keep."

What NewsCloud Provides

What NewsCloud provides is an open source suite of tools for hosting interactive features simultaneously on Facebook applications and as Facebook Connect Websites (learn more about these). News organizations can leverage Facebook authentication and identity while essentially extending their own websites with NewsCloud and maintain complete ownership. They can even plug in their own advertising engine, statistical tracking and index the content with search engines.

If a reporter wants to gather ideas from readers, they can use our idea board. If they want to add a fun predictions game to a sports topic, they can use our predictions feature. If they want to collect crowdsourced links related to a particular story or topic, they can use our directory feature. These are just a few examples.

We've been shocked that news organizations are turning over their comment engines to proprietary Facebook plugins, giving ownership control and the advantages of open search to Facebook. NewsCloud is the kind of solution that provides integration with social media while maintaining openness and control.

NewsCloud allows news organizations to dramatically upgrade their websites with interactive social media connected features at very low cost. 

Ready to learn more? Start with our community guide to the platform

 

 

 

NewsCloud to Make Facebook-Connected Communities Easy

For Immediate Release: May 4, 2011
You can also read this release at the Knight Foundation's Website

NewsCloud to Make Facebook-Connected Communities Easy
Knight Foundation grant will support improved simplicity and affordability
in innovative open source technology
 

SEATTLE, WA. — Social media developer  NewsCloud will make its open source Facebook-connected platform easier and more affordable for communities and news organizations. The project is being made possible by a $190,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

For the last year, NewsCloud has launched Facebook-connected community applications for organizations as large as The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. “Cost and complexity remain the greatest barriers to adoption by a wider array of news and community organizations,” said Jeff Reifman, NewsCloud Founder. “With this grant, we’re going to eliminate these barriers and deliver an affordable turnkey solution.”

According to Facebook statistics, there are more than 500 million active Facebook members, who collectively spend 700 billion minutes per month on the service. To build informed and engaged online communities, developers like NewsCloud have to pair interactive community features closely with Facebook. NewsCloud’s platform connects users to one another with features such as blogging, forums, multimedia galleries, a predictions game, classifieds, questions and answers, idea gathering, and more.

“The new version of NewsCloud will be especially useful to local community news sites and community foundations supporting local journalism,” said Jose Zamora, Knight Foundation Journalism Program Associate. “NewsCloud’s next iteration will allow organizations interested in integrating their sites with Facebook to do it without having to invest in technical support. It will allow them to use social networks to increase their reach, inform, engage and interact with their communities online. The platform also opens new revenue opportunities for news sites of any size.”

NewsCloud plans to deliver the first iteration of its simplified, turnkey software by September 2011. Improvements will continue through April 2012. “Not only will the next release be easier to set up, manage and populate with content, but you can host it for less than $100 per month,” says Reifman. Software developers can install the current NewsCloud software used by larger news organizations by visiting http://opensource.newscloud.com.

The Knight Foundation has funded NewsCloud’s research efforts and development since 2008. Research into the engagement of young people with news in Facebook is available at http://newscloud.com/research. NewsCloud’s recent report on its work with news organizations is available here. 

About NewsCloud

Launched in 2005, NewsCloud provides a robust open source community engagement platform for news and community organizations. The NewsCloud source code is available free to download. Visit opensource.newscloud.com or follow @newscloud on Twitter for additional information and updates.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation 

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation invests in journalism excellence worldwide and in the vitality of U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950, the foundation has granted more than $400 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. Knight Foundation focuses on projects with the potential to create transformational change. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

Contact: 

Marc Fest, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, (305) 908-2677, fest@knightfoundation.org

Jeff Reifman, NewsCloud, jeff@newscloud.com

 

Customizing Your Home Page for Community

Part of the series on NewsCloud's Philosophy of Online Community Building and Social Media.

The NewsCloud platform offers tremendous flexibility for choosing the layout of your site's home page. We've designed a variety of widgets that you can choose from - and the layouts can be customized and adjusted at any time through a simple drag and drop interface.

Here are some example home pages from our partners:

 

 

 

 

Our latest design, reflected in The Needle and Carolyn Hax's site above showcase some new widgets that we think work well to promote the growth of community.

Designing the Home Page for Community Growth

At The Needle, our showcase site for Seattle, we place a few key widgets at the top of the home page to drive activity: We use the triple box feature widget to showcase popular items (based on quantity of Likes), the list widget to showcase new items and the featured article widget to showcase our own content. We believe this provides a balance of new, popular and curated content to draw readers in and get them to participate. 

Each of these widgets can be configured in different ways. For example, you can use a list widget to showcase popular items instead of new items. The triple box widget can show either new or popular items or you can manually drag and drop stories to feature. There are also other feature widgets for showcasing specific curated content. The featured article widget can showcase more than one recent entry to give the site a look and feel similar to a blog. We're always adding flexibility to the home page widgets based on requests from partners and open source adopters.

There are a variety of ways to add content to our site, both manual and automated. Many of our widgets, like the triple box above, are designed to integrate automated content from feeds.

 

To keep the site as real time as possible, we use a Newswire widget to showcase headlines from other Seattle sites. Readers on The Needle can choose to post these "wire" stories to The Needle and add their commentary. We also use a Twitter List widget to show tweets from a curated selection of Seattle-based twitterers.

There's also a welcome panel widget to explain to new users a bit more about the site's purpose. And, there's a recent users gallery showing the faces of other recent site participants. We found in our earlier Hot Dish climate change site research that visitors gradually become familiar with each other on the site and returned daily to see what their online acquaintances were posting.

 

 

 

Showcasing Community Features on the Home Page

NewsCloud offers a variety of interactive and crowdsourced features to enhance your site e.g. peer Q & A, shared multimedia Galleries, a Predictions game, the Classifieds feature, Discussion Forums, Idea gathering, Resource Directories, Event Calendars, et al.

Each NewsCloud feature has several widgets that can be presented on the home page. Here are a few examples:

 

 

These widgets allow you to further customize your site and promote specific features or usage scenarios that you want to showcase. They can be easily re-arranged or modified via a simple drag and drop interface at any time.

If you have more questions, please visit http://support.newscloud.com

Our work has been generously funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and is freely available for open source download.

Read the previous post: Many Ways to Add Content to Your NewsCloud Community Site