NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

Free Hosting and Support for the First Patch Editor to Jump Ship

Inspired by Howard Owens post encouraging Patch editors to jump ship (via @michelemclellan, @poynter) from AOL and start their own Facebook-connected, hyperlocal community sites, we'd like to offer a soft landing of six months free hosting, managed service and technical support to the first Patch editor who wants to run their site with NewsCloud. 

We're a free, open source, community engagement platform funded generously by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Our platform offers features that encourage engaged communities filled with user generated content such as sharing news, blog posts, photos & video, crowdsourcing ideas, favorite places and resources, discussion forums, classifieds and lending library for sharing physical goods, peer Q&A, et al. All of NewsCloud's features are tightly integrated to Facebook and Twitter. Learn more.

We agree with Owens: "Jump on in, the water’s fine."

Host a Community of Bloggers - Online Community Building Recipes

This post is part of a series we're putting together on online community building recipes for the NewsCloud Facebook application. Please share your feedback and ideas with us.

When KPCC, an NPR affiliate in Southern California, decided to launch a Facebook application, they wanted to focus distinctly on user generated content. Hence, The Freeway was born.

KPCC recruited a number of community volunteers to kick off the community blogging on topics as varied as gardening, poetry and cycling.

The best bloggers are essentially co-hosts of the site. Their activity keeps the site fresh, draws in readers from around the Web and provides content for on-air and KPCC website cross promotion.

Approved co-hosts are now indicated on the site with a small star icon beside their Facebook profile photo.

The Charlotte Observer's Insight Facebook application works similarly. This past week, an Insight blog post on Atheism led to major story which The Observer ran on their front page (see below). Regular cross promotion of blog posts from your Facebook community in print or on air is a great way to incent participation.

  

Recruiting a community of bloggers for your site may require a great deal of effort and creative outreach. But, if successful, as these trials are showing, it can extend your brand's reach in a truly unique way.

Incent your users with cross-promotional opportunities - Online Community Building Recipes

This post is part of a series we're putting together on online community building recipes for the NewsCloud Facebook application. Please share your feedback and ideas with us.

One way to stimulate participation in your Facebook application community is by providing a variety of incentives. The incentives don't have to be monetary - often recognition or the opportunity to have an idea or article amplified within the community is sufficient.

Recently, William Warren, a member of the Insight Facebook application from the Charlotte Observer posted a story about his atheist billboard advertisement which appeared on the Billy Graham Highway in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Observer decided to send a reporter out to interview him and ran the story on the front page of its paper and its website: Atheists Buy Sign on Billy Graham Highway.

"When the words 'under God' were inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance between 'one nation' and 'indivisible,' they made a lie out of both those ideals," Joseph McDaniel Stewart, vice president of FreeThoughtAction and one of the N.C. coalition founders, said in an e-mail. "You can't have an indivisible nation if you draw a line between the godly and godless. We all belong here." 

This is a great example of using cross promotion to incentivize participation. Insight is encouraging its members to post story ideas as well as to write their own stories using the community blogging feature. If you have a great idea or a great story, you might see it shared with the entire Charlotte Observer community.

 The story ended up generating a large number of page views for The Observer. More extensive online coverage ensued after someone defaced the billboard.

Similarly, KPCC radio, an NPR affiliate in Southern California, plans to mention articles that its co-hosts write on its Facebook application, The Freeway, on air on the radio and on the station website.

Stories and blog posts aren't the only Facebook application features to cross promote. Other user generated content that might make sense to promote could be a great user comment or idea or an interesting event or a great question. Think outside of the box. 

Creating creative new exposure for your application members creates a positive feedback cycle that will continually stimulate participation and energize your Facebook community.

You can read more about this example at the Knight Foundation blog: Custom Facebook News App Engages Readers and Drives Story to Front Page of Local Paper

Surfshare adds tipping and payment options

Update: Get the new plugin for your WordPress blog

We've added payment options to our experimental Surfshare service for bloggers and news sites. 

Tipping: If you visit a page you really enjoy, you can tip the blogger a small amount e.g. 25 cents to $5.00. Your tips will be aggregated on a regular billing statement. In fact, if you like this post, click the Leave a tip link in the right sidebar below Your Site Activity.

Larger contributions and Surfshare micropayments:

If you visit a Surfshare-enabled site regularly enough, you'll occasionally be reminded to support the site. View the popup shown below. Or, you can trigger the popup by visiting a number of pages on this site - or just click this link, or here or here.

There are essentially three options:

1) You can authorize the site to be included in your Surfshare bill. Currently, one cent will be added to your bill for each story you read (unique stories, not visits). 

2) You can choose to make a larger contribution to the site e.g. $5 - $100. 

Both of these kinds of payments will be aggregated in the same monthly statement mentioned above.

3) You can choose to keep reading for free ... and we'll remind me you again at a later date.

Our goal is to give the user as much control over the process as possible. Users can cancel tips, donations and micropayments any time before paying their first bill. We hope to add more account and privacy options soon.

You can add Surfshare to your blog or news site here. There is no cost to use the service. Learn more about SurfShare from here.

Disclaimers: Surfshare is an experimental service, still in alpha. We do not intend to collect any revenue from this service until 2010. Readers will have a chance to reset their balances up until we commence billing.

The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging

The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging may be interesting to NewsCloud readers curious about blogging. Watch Jon Stewart interview Arianna.

The Huffington Post recently received a $25 million dollar venture capital investment - but Jon didn't ask her about this.

Knight News Challenge Winners Announced; MIT Tops List With $5 Million

Editor and Publisher reports the MIT Media Lab received a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation "to create a Center for Future Civic Media to develop, test, and study new forms of high-tech community news." Other winners included $700k to MTV for mobile youth journalists to cover the 2008 election. ChicagoCrime received $1.1M "to create a series of city-specific Web sites devoted to public records and hyper-local information" and VillageSoup received $885K "to build free software to allow others to replicate the citizen journalism and community participation." E & P also reports "Eleven other grants of between $25,000 and $340,000 were awarded...[and]...nine bloggers will each get $15,000 to blog about topics ranging from GPS tracking devices to 'out-of-the-box' community publishing solutions." Congrats to all the winners!

For the rest of us, there's always next year. Entries start up for 2007 July 1st, but are more narrowly focused than last year:

Anybody, anywhere in the world is eligible for funding — if the project meets all of the following criteria:

1. Use digital media.
2. Involve new forms of news in the public interest.
3. Focus on specific geographic community.

NewsCloud entered its open source platform in 2006. Although we were asked to submit a secondary application, we were not selected as a winner.

Technorati Tags: knight foundation, news challenge, knight foundation winners

Lifehacker's guide to weblog comments

Via Kathy:

Good blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly and engaged. Build your own online social capital and become a great blog commenter by keeping these simple guidelines in mind before you post.

Stay on topic.

Bloggers enable comments on specific blog posts to hear more about the content of the post. Don't change the subject. There's nothing more annoying than seeing a comment on a post about Hurricane Katrina that reads, "By the way, do you know anything about turtles?"

Contribute new information to the discussion.

Twelve people saying the same exact thing in one comment thread is useless and irritating. Before you comment, read the entire thread and make sure your comment offers something new to the conversation. If you don't have the time or patience to read an entire thread, then don't comment at all. The longer a comment thread the more likely someone has already said what you're thinking, and the less likely it is to be read by future visitors anyway.

Don't comment for the sake of commenting.

Commenters who only say "First!" or "Nice site" on an open thread have no business hitting that "Post" button at all. Further, only spammers comment for the sake of adding their name and URL to a web page. Useless comments will gain you the reputation for being a useless commenter.

Read the rest of Lifehacker's guide to weblog comments

Technorati Tags: comments, guide to weblog comments, lifehacker

The three things I don't like about Newsvine

Newsvine is another local Seattle social news startup. They have six employees and about $1.25 million in funding. They are different than NewsCloud in that they focus a lot on original material whereas NewsCloud is more of an aggregator using citizens as editors.

The three things I don't like about Newsvine are:

1) The big green monster at the top of every page. I find it big, dark and confusing...

2) As they license the Associated Press feed, they seed much of their site with only AP content. Readers can submit from other sources but I find the primary content very mainstream. Check out the NewsCloud Newswire for a more diversified approach.

3) They lock readers into their blogging service. Newsvine authors are essentially bloggers who only blog about newsy material and only on Newsvine. With such great blog tools such as WordPress (free), Blogger (free) and TypePad out there, why lock their members into a proprietary tool. Blogging is meant to be more than just news. I just find the idea of Newsvine's proprietary blogging service very restrictive. Btw, NewsCloud's approach is to allow readers to blog stories to almost any third party service - our approach is open.

Technorati Tags: newsvine, seattle, newscloud, things I don't like

Copy as HTML: A Firefox Add-on Makes Posting Stories and Comments Easier

Now that NewsCloud allows the posting of stories with rich, HTML-formatted captions and comments, you might check out the Firefox Add-on Extended Copy Menu. It allows you to easily select a block of text as HTML instead of plain text.

So, for example, if you wanted to copy a paragraph with links on a Web page to post as a comment or a story caption, you would just select the desired text, right-click your mouse and select Copy as HTML. Then, when you paste it into NewsCloud, the links and formatting would be maintained.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Technorati Tags: firefox add-ons, extended copy menu, copy as HTML

Bling for Your Blog

The New York Times has a story about blog widgets today.

You can get NewsCloud's TypePad Widget or learn about other ways to put our content on your site here.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, typepad widget