NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

Introducing NewsCloud Community Scoring and Member Levels

From the beginning, a primary goal of building the NewsCloud community has been to empower it with influence over the way the site itself operates. Today, I'm introducing an experimental scoring system which rewards more active NewsCloud users with more influence in our community.

Initially, I've programmed NewsCloud to rank members based on their levels of participation as well as performance as judged by other members (through responses to posted stories and comments). From these rankings, NewsCloud assigns each member a user level e.g. Platinum (high), Gold, Silver, Bronze, Contributor and Reader (beginner). The higher your user level, the more voting power you have to determine which stories appear on the front page at NewsCloud. Rankings will be re-calculated regularly. If your participation increases, expect to see your user level grow over time. By visiting your account page, you can see a complete breakdown of the factors we're measuring and how you rank against the overall community.

The ranking system not only rewards you for voting and posting stories and comments but it also rewards you when stories you post generate discussions or when other readers rate your comments highly. The rankings also reward you for inviting new members to our community - especially so when they join. It also assesses your involvement over the past 30 days as well as the past six months.

I will continue to experiment and tweak the measurement system over time to produce better and better results. If you have questions or feedback, please email me at jeff@newscloud.com. Please also let me know if you encounter any problems with the new rankings or experience problems voting.

Thank you for your continued support!

You can view your account score here. Here is an example breakdown below:

Technorati Tags: member levels, user scoring, ranking

Browse incoming stories from around the Web

NewsCloud has a new Incoming Stories page which allows you to browse feeds from around the Web. On the new page, you can browse stories that readers have posted to NewsCloud or wire feeds from our partner sites, other mainstream media and even reader blogs! You can also visit your account page and add your own blog to share with NewsCloud readers. If you don't have a blog, you can get a free WordPress blog at NewsCloud.

Technorati Tags: rss, newswires, incoming stories, free blog, wordpress

NewsCloud Now Offers Comment Rating

Now you can rate the comments of other NewsCloud readers. You can also sort a comment thread by date or ratings. Link to example

Technorati Tags: comment ratings

Open Source Facebook Newsroom CMS Application Beta

Today, we're releasing a beta of our new open source Facebook Newsroom CMS application framework:

The Facebook Newsroom CMS framework is generic Facebook application code which can be quickly and easily installed, configured and customized for any small organization wanting to establish a sophisticated Web presence within the Facebook community. We hope this framework will drastically reduce the barrier to entry for organizations wishing to leverage Facebook. See our demonstration site at Facebook.

While Facebook has Groups and Pages that are easy to set up, they are also quite limited in functionality.  These features are not conducive to community-building, engagement or organizing. Until now, building a Facebook application with broader capabilities required a significant investment of $5  - $15,000 minimum. This framework provides the easiest, most customizable and economical solution for small and/or non profit organizations to run an application on Facebook.

It's essentially a start up kit for small organizations wishing to build a Facebook application without spending thousands of dollars. It's also a great starting point which can later be enhanced and extended with additional features. With just a few hours, a Web developer with basic PHP skills can launch your application. Hosting can even be obtained free for one year at Joyent (waiting list may exist for free accounts).

Since the framework is open source, it can grow over time as the development community contributes new capabilities. You can download the source at SourceForge or learn more at our Wiki.

Available Features

The default framework provides some basic pages (like a basic Web site or Drupal or Plone installation) e.g. Home page, Newsroom, Photos, Wall, Discussion Forum, Invitations page and About page. It also provides basic content management (CMS) features for customizing the site from within a Web-based management user interface which many users are already familiar with. Pages can be turned on or off or content edited in place.

The news features include integration with your organization's own RSS feed (from a blog or Web site) and the NewsCloud Newsroom which provides real time community-driven news content on a variety of topics. The NewsCloud Newsroom can also be fully customized. If you have a Drupal-based Web site, check out the Drupal NewsCloud module.

The CMS supports HTML blocks and iFrames to allow you to integrate advertising e.g. Google AdSense, fundraising e.g. ChipIn, photos e.g. Flickr slideshows and more.

See the generic demonstration site on Facebook for examples.

For updates, please check back at the NewsCloud blog or subscribe to our feed.

Newsroom Wiki Project Page

Download the code from SourceForge

Drupal Newsroom Module and demonstration site

Requirements

Facebook Developer account
Linux hosting with PHP 5.x (4.x with minor changes)/MySQL 4.x

Possible hosting options:

Joyent
JohnCompanies
Amazon S3  (may be a bit expensive for some organizations)

Questions?

Set up instructions are included in the readme file with the code download. As usual, please contact me via email at jeff@newscloud.com with any questions, bug reports or feature requests. Thanks all!

Talk About This feature added

We've introduced a new feature at NewsCloud called Talk About This which emails readers when there's an important story to discuss (no more than every 2-3 days). If you wish to turn off this feature, you can opt out at anytime by changing your subscription settings in your profile. Talk about this will help stimulate discussions on hot topics and breaking stories within our community.

The first two stories were: Studies: CO2 output must cease altogether and Tibetan monks 'surrounded' by Chinese troops ... join the discussions there...

Technorati Tags: comments, talk about this, email alerts

Rich text editing for comments and story captions

We're experimenting with adding the open source FredCK editor to NewsCloud comments and story posting. The editor makes it easier to edit and format rich text comments and and captions. Please give it a try and let us know what you think. You can see it here and here.

If you run into any bugs or problems with it, please email me.

Technorati Tags: fckeditor, rich text formatting, comments

Drupal Newsroom Module Beta Release

Today, I'm excited to announce the Drupal Newsroom Module beta powered by NewsCloud. The Drupal Newsroom provides an excellent way to add dynamic current events and news to your Drupal-powered Web site. It's also a great way to stimulate involvement and discussion in your online member community.

The Drupal Newsroom module provides a page for your Drupal-powered Web site with news stories based on specific topic(s) from NewsCloud.com or populated by your staff or site members. The newsroom module allows your members to browse headlines, read stories, vote, comment and post new articles.

The Drupal Newsroom allows organizations on different Web sites to collaborate, selecting stories for a topic-based newsroom, sharing the content and discussions from their site with other like-minded groups.

Features

• Share news stories within your Drupal-based Web site community
• Automatically feed stories into your Web site from NewsCloud.com based on a topic or seed them yourself
• Allow your members or staff to post their own stories
• Allow your members to participate in the story presentation process by voting on their favorites
• Allow your members to comment on stories and engage in discussions
• Allows your organization to pre-approve all public stories (optional)
• Republishes your news stories to the NewsCloud.com community (and optionally comments) for additional outreach
• Provides an RSS feed of your newsroom available for your site members

Visit the Drupal Newsroom Demonstration page to see it in action. You can log in with the credentials user name: user and password: user to post stories, votes and comments.

Learn more or download the beta at the NewsCloud Wiki.

This is also the first major cross-platform application of the NewsCloud Web Services API.

Please send feature requests and bug reports to jeff@newscloud.com. This module was developed by Dave Tarc. Thanks to Alex and Rob at Social Signal for helping in the specification of the module features and Jodie Tonita for making the introduction.

Technorati Tags: drupal, drupal module, drupal plugin, newscloud, newscloud api, newsroom

November is Feature Request Month at NewsCloud

If you have a favorite feature idea or feature request, post it to the comments here and we'll try to prioritize adding the most popular and interesting by the end of the month. Thanks for your continued support!

If you want to share your idea privately, you can email it to me.

Technorati Tags: feature requests, november, wish lists

NewsCloud Now Supports Sign In via Your Facebook Account

If you are a regular Facebook user, you can now sign in or sign up at NewsCloud just by clicking the Facebook icon on our NewsCloud Sign In page. If you are already logged in to Facebook, you'll be automatically logged in to your NewsCloud account without having to type a password. If not, Facebook will ask you to sign in, then you'll be redirected back to NewsCloud all signed in.- again no password.

If you have a Facebook account but haven't signed up at NewsCloud, just click the Facebook icon and you can sign in or register at NewsCloud without having to provide a new password.

You can try it from here too:

We've also recently added support for sign in and registration via OpenID.

Technorati Tags: facebook, newscloud, openid

NewsCloud Now Supports OpenID

We've added support for OpenID, an emerging authentication system for users to log in without passwords. Essentially, you get an OpenID at one site and create a password at that site to authenticate yourself. Then, as you visit other OpenID-enabled sites, you just provide an address of your profile page from that Web site to login or register at other sites. There's no need to remember more than one password. We think OpenID is great and have been meaning to support it for quite a while.

NewsCloud supports consumer and identity server implementations of OpenID. This means that:

a) You can login or register at NewsCloud with an OpenID from another OpenID Identity Server site such as LiveJournal, Vox or MyOpenID et al. When you create a new account at NewsCloud in this manner, you won't have to create and verify a password.
b) You can use our NewsCloud Journal address e.g. jeff.newscloud.com as an OpenID to sign in at other OpenID-enabled Web sites.

OpenID (Wikipedia)
OpenID Directory of Enabled Sites
OpenID Directory of Identity Servers
Watch an interview with Simon Willison about OpenID

We added OpenID capability to our site with the OpenID Enabled PHP Library and the Automattic MU WordPress OpenID Plugin.

We've also recently added sign on via Facebook. You can sign in to NewsCloud just by clicking the Facebook icon on our Sign In page, as long as you have a Facebook account.

Technorati Tags: facebook, newscloud, openid, wordpress