NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

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

Many Ways to Add Content to Your NewsCloud Community Site

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

Our partners always ask about the ways they can add content to their NewsCloud site and specifically, what can be automated. We've built a number of options for populating your community site with content as easily as possible.

The Pros and Cons of Automation

A lot of our mainstream media partners want to automate importing content into their community site. While this can reduce the need for staff time and involvement, it can also reduce the quality, focus and appearance of content on the site.

Readers can tell when a site only includes content from an automated engine. The headlines aren't well chosen, the images often don't work well and there isn't as much focus of the editorial voice.

Since NewsCloud makes it so easy to post selected content manually (it only takes a few minutes a day), we often ask why an organization wants to put the effort into launching a community site if it has so little staff time to dedicate to it?

That said, NewsCloud has built support to automatically import a selected XML feed of content from your CMS with the proper headlines and images ... but few partners do the development work on their side to generate a special feed of featured stories for their NewsCloud community site.

We also offer some automated ways to speed importing of selected content without sacrificing your curated editorial voice.

Approaches for Distributing and Minimizing the Workload

It's often useful to have a group of staff involved in posting content to the site. If each staff member posts once a day or every other day, the site will have a fairly active curated voice. 

Another option is to recruit moderators (paid or volunteer). One of our partners used 40 bloggers. This can spread the workload around as well. However, it does reduce the amount of control you have over your editorial voice.

As your community grows, readers will post the majority of content and the site won't require as much leadership from your team. However, it's important to have a plan to populate your site with fresh content as you're trying to attract people to your new site.

Options for Manually Posting Content

1. Post a Story Wizard. You can visit the post a story wizard page and paste a URL for the news story you want to add. NewsCloud will look up the title, caption and images for the story (if available) and make it easy for you to complete your post.

2. Post a Story Bookmarklet. You can drag the post story bookmarklet to your browser bar and then when you visit a third party news site, like The New York Times, you can just click the bookmarklet button and NewsCloud will launch a popup pre-filled with URL, title, caption and any images (if available) to make it easy for you to submit the story.

3. Compose an Article Wizard. You can visit the compose an article page to compose a longer blog entry or article with our rich text editor. This is great for original work - and user generated blogs.

 

4. Quick posting stories from the Newswire page. If your site imports RSS feeds into the Newswire page (see below), then you can visit the Newswire page and manually click Quick Post or Publish to add a headline to your site. Quick post will automatically load the title, caption and images into your site (making its best guesses) while Publish will allow you to customize your story before you complete the post. 

Options for Automation

1. Importing RSS headlines and captions into the Newswire feed. NewsCloud allows you to choose any number of RSS feed to import headlines into the Newswire area.

There's often a lot of confusion between stories and newswires. NewsCloud essentially maintains two buckets of story content: stories & articles vs. newswire headlines. Readers can't Like, Comment on or Share Newswire headlines unless someone chooses to add it to the site as a full story. However, there are widgets for the home page to show the latest RSS headlines, which can help to keep your site content fresh.

2. Importing stories you share via Google Reader. If you (or several staff members or moderators) use Google Reader, you can import shared stories into your NewsCloud site. This allows you and your staff to browse Google Reader (on the Web or from a smartphone) and post stories to your NewsCloud site simply by sharing them. The downside to this automated approach is that it is not possible to edit headlines, captions or choose images before the stories are posted.

3. Importing every story from your RSS feed(s). NewsCloud can also import every RSS headline as a full story, using the best title, abstract and image that it finds. The problem with this approach is that you are essentially duplicating the content on your website and not providing a focused, curated editorial voice for your community site. Note: if you create a custom RSS feed of selected, curated stories - then this can be a decent option (you can also use option 4 below).

4. Importing every story from a custom XML feed. If your content management system (CMS) can generate a custom XML data feed with the headline, abstract and images that you want to load into your community site, NewsCloud can import this content as well. Again, this generally works best if you are selected a curated subset of stories for your community site rather than every single story on your existing website.

5. Importing videos from a YouTube channel into your video gallery. Our new gallery feature can import videos from your YouTube channel into your NewsCloud community site. 

In the future, we're planning to allow automated importing of news stories from a specified Twitter list. So, essentially, you can create a Twitter list of curated Twitterers and NewsCloud will filter out the news stories that they are tweeting or stories tweeted by multiple folks, and we'll post those to your community site, referencing the original Twitterers.

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: How Community Foundations Can Create Local Online Hubs with NewsCloud.

How Community Foundations Can Create Local Online Hubs with NewsCloud

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

NewsCloud's open source platform is an ideal tool for community foundations wishing to help their communities and grantees become hosts of vibrant online communities. This post will present some resources and suggestions for approaching this kind of project.

Why Community Foundations Should Invest in Local Online Hubs

The Knight Commission recently released a must read report entitled Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action:

"Ensuring that every local community has at least one high-quality hub is one of 15 key recommendations made by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy."

This report is a great resource for understanding the role local online hubs in creating informed and engaged commnunities.

The report highlights three approaches often taken: 1) Hubs focused on community government information, 2) Community Connections: Local forums and Community E-mail Listserves and 3) Community News and Commentary. NewsCloud's platform excels at the latter and can also provide forums and help present directories to community and government resources. 

Consider looking at the Knight Foundation's Community Information Challenge as a possible funding source - see #7 below. Current challenge deadline is March 7th. The Community Information Challenge FAQ states: "Knight is looking for projects that help fill community information needs, foster community engagement and help residents participate in the creation and sharing of news and information." This exactly describes what you and your grantees can accomplish with the NewsCloud platform.

What is the NewsCloud Platform

NewsCloud's platform offers a variety of news and interactive community building features that are ideal for place-based (or topic-based) community building. These features are designed to transition organizations from a monolithic publishing model to a more social, peer to peer, user generated content approach. 

NewsCloud's features include: publishing news and audience story links from around the Web, reader blogging, crowdsourced question and answers for member peer-support, crowdsourced directories of resources e.g. government links or community hotspots, crowdsourced idea gathering, discussion forums, classifieds and lending library (for selling, sharing or giving away physical items such as books or household stuff), photo and video galleries and even a predictions game. All of these features are tightly integrated into Facebook and Twitter for viral sharing and easy access.

Sites as large as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and MPR News are experimenting with NewsCloud sites. You can see some examples of NewsCloud in action here.

The NewsCloud code is freely available for open source download since it's been largely funded by the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. However, installing and managing a site requires moderate technical expertise and hosting expense (we plan to reduce these over the next year).

While the hosting and managing of the technology does requires some ongoing investment or technical expertise, the bulk of your investment should be made in community moderation, outreach and promotion.

Strategies for Launching Local Online Community Hubs

1) Ask your local grantees to collaborate on a community hub

Initially populating content for and promoting interactive community sites is the biggest challenge to getting these kinds of communities off the ground. If multiple grantee organizations are involved in a local community, it distributes the workload and diversifies the community from the beginning. It also is likely that they will each promote the site to different communities, enhancing your outreach and marketing effort.

Host a regular conference with moderators (weekly at first) to plan, coordinate and share learning from working with the community and the site technology. Collect feedback and requests for NewsCloud at its online support forum.

2) Consider funding one full time community moderator and grantee coordinator

Depending on the number of collaborative grantees, it may be helpful to have a dedicated staff member whose responsibility is to oversee the quality and management of the site.

3) Provide a marketing and promotions budget for the site

Sites without marketing don't grow. Period. Be sure to provide a moderate budget for raising awareness about your new hub in its first year(s).

4) Fund the hosting, technical management and support for the site

Consider this a basic infrastructure and capacity building investment to enable your grantees to collaborate on a a local online hub using the NewsCloud technology.  

If you work privately with NewsCloud, it generally costs about $10,000 - $12,000 to set up, train staff, design the skin and host a site for the first year. It's less in subsequent years. Since NewsCloud is open source - you can also hire your favorite local technical consultant to do this instead. 

5) Consider allocating funds for additional software development for special requests

Either working with the open source community or NewsCloud, provide some budget for requests and ideas from your grantees to be turned into reality. For example, maybe one community will want to build a plug-in to help local parents coordinate shared child care. Another might want a mobile platform (another item were hoping to build later this year).

6) Have Grantees Work Together Over Time to Experiment with Approaches for the Site Business Model and Its Sustainability

You won't fund this site forever, but it will take one to three years at least for a site to become self-sufficient. Encourage your grantees from the beginning to collaborate and brainstorm on approaches that might work. Local advertising, charging for classifieds, annual membership for readers, fundraising drives, etc.

7) Consider making an information needs application request to fund broader investment in your community site

Unfortunately, the current contest deadline is Monday, March 7th (but the form is simple - just four questions, so apply now). However, the contest runs regularly throughout the year.

Because the information challenge cycle takes about six months, it may not be as appropriate for launching your local hub as it would be for expanding and deepening your efforts e.g. outreach, unique feature development, experiments with approach and business model, etc.

Have some feedback on this post? Share it at our support discussion site.

Read the previous post: What is the Difference Between a Facebook Page and a NewsCloud Community Site?

 

What is the Difference Between a Facebook Page and a NewsCloud Community Site?

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

A lot of our partners are confused by the differences between a Facebook Page and our open source NewsCloud Community application and whether the two can be used together.

What is a Facebook Page?

Facebook Pages are Facebook's standard outreach object - a place where you can create a mini website within Facebook about your topic, organization or personality.

Pros:

• Facebook pages are easy to create, set up and post content to
• Facebook pages usually have a simple web address (url) for sharing e.g. http://www.facebook.com/carolyn.hax
• Facebook pages offer a wall for sharing links, an info business card page, a discussion page, notes, Facebook events and a place to share photos and videos
• Facebook pages are free
• Facebook pages spread virally among friends: It's easy for people to share links from your Facebook Page on their own wall so that it may appear in their friends' news feeds.
• Facebook pages help you aggregate fans of your organization, topic or personality
• Facebook pages offer the ability to restrict permissions for posting
• You can post announcements directly to the Facebook newsfeed of your fans
• Facebook page functionality can be extended with third party applications
• Facebook provides useful statistics for analyzing your fan base and page traffic

Cons:

• Facebook pages offer limited to no design customization or branding
• Facebook pages are kind of boring - they look just like everyone else's Facebook page
• Facebook pages are rarely a place where fans return to do daily to learn about what you're up to. It's more likely they'll just read about you in their feed.
• Comment threads tend to accumulate on your Facebook page and not on your website. Not only do you end up with two sets of comment threads but your community activity is generating revenue for Facebook (because they run ads on the side of your page, not you)
• Fans of your Facebook page and fans of your NewsCloud application cannot be aggregated - for some reason Facebook hasn't decided to allow this yet.
• Facebook page content is not generally indexed actively by search engines.
• It's difficult for people to find old content from a Facebook Page wall as there is currently no search and limited navigation
• Your page is subject to Facebook's censorship and administrative policies. Theoretically, it could be turned off at any time.

What is NewsCloud's Community Facebook Application?

NewsCloud's community application runs a Facebook application or a Facebook Connect Website. It's essentially a technology for hosting an interactive community home for your audience.

Pros:

• Fully customize the design, branding, choice and layout of elements on your site home page
• Offers a variety of interactive features unavailable on pages e.g. news, blogging, photo & video galleries, resource directories, event calendar, predictions game, classifieds and lending library, question & answer feature, discussion forums, idea gathering, et al. See the complete feature summary.
• The design of our applications encourages the growth of community, helps your audience discover other readers and builds loyalty with your mission. Members are rewarded for participating with a scoring system.
• The Facebook Connect Website can run at your own domain e.g. http://carolynhax.washpost.com which makes sharing the site easier for readers
• Our platform provides its own notification system to tell audience members when people are interacting with their content.
• Audience members can like or comment on content in your site and have it automatically shared on their wall.
• There are a variety of ways to automatically integrate content into your site from existing news feeds.
• You can integrate your site traffic into your existing statistical engine e.g. Google Analytics or Omniture
• You can integrate advertising from your existing advertising system e.g. Google's Doubleclick, OpenX, Helios, et al. You earn revenue from your community traffic rather than Facebook.
• Allows readers to share your content virally via Facebook, Twitter and other services.
• Content on your site is published to a standard sitemap for search engines to index. This helps readers discover content on your site.
• Readers can search your site for older content using our google search widget
• Our platform is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation so it's open source. It's features are continually improving and expanding - and you can customize it yourself if you choose to.
• You control the site, the database, the member list, the source code - not Facebook. Facebook can't turn off your site.

Cons:

• The breadth of our community site requires that you dedicate some staff time to populate content and moderate the website 
• There is some moderate complexity to operating the site technically and therefore incurs some hosting and managed service costs
• Facebook creates an application page separate from any fan page you set up - these fans cannot be combined/integrated with your existing fan pages.
• You cannot contact registered members of your site unless they voluntarily provide an email address during or after registration or return to your site to see notifications.

Our work has been generously funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and is freely available for open source download. You can read Facebook's own platform documentation here.

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

Read the previous post: Choosing between a Facebook Application and a Facebook Connect Website.

Choosing Between a Facebook Application or a Facebook Connect Website

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

 The NewsCloud Open Source platform allows news and community organizations to run either a Facebook Application or a Facebook Connect Website. In fact, it can run both simultaneously for you. 

What do each of these concepts mean and what are the pros and cons of each kind of site? This is a common question from our partners and it's often difficult for our contacts to explain these concepts internally within their organizations.

What is a Facebook Application?

You can run the NewsCloud community platform within the Facebook website. This allows people to click on links from a Facebook page or a friend's wall without leaving Facebook.

If you are promoting your application from a Facebook page or from a Facebook advertisement, it's great to link people to your application without making them leave Facebook.

Pros:

• Readers don't have to leave Facebook to use your application
• You can still track statistics for page views with your existing Google Analytics or Omniture account
• You can still integrate your own advertising rotation system inside the canvas area of your application (everything to the left of the Facebook ad rail on the right.

Cons:

• Facebook's canvas area is narrow, so your community application is more visually compressed
• Facebook's application URL is complicated and hard to spread by word of mouth e.g. http://apps.facebook.com/yourboston
• Facebook's application pages load more slowly than our Facebook Connect application because there is a lot more Facebook-specific material being loaded (navigation, advertising, etc.)
• Facebook's advertising will appear on the right side of every page. Facebook is making money from your application's usage.
• As of October 1, 2011, Facebook requires SSL certificates be purchased and used for managing canvas application sessions. This requires additional expense and administrative burdens.

What is a Facebook Connect Website? 

You can run the NewsCloud community platform as a standalone website which uses Facebook Connect to authenticate (register and sign in) members. You can also use elements of the NewsCloud website as an extension to your existing website, linking to specific interactive features (blogging, predictions, classifieds) as you need them.

Pros: 

• You can use your own domain name e.g. http://theneedle.us or http://carolynhax.washpost.com which makes it easier for readers to share your community site
• The website version of our platform loads faster and provides more visual space for the layout because it's not restricted to the Facebook frame
• You don't have to place Facebook advertising on your community site
• You can still track statistics for page views with your existing Google Analytics or Omniture account
• You can still integrate your own advertising rotation system inside the canvas area of your application (everything to the left of the Facebook ad rail on the right.

Cons:

• When promoting your community site within Facebook, links will make readers leave Facebook to see your site.

Do we need to choose between one or the other?

Thanks to the model view controller architecture of Ruby on Rails used by the NewsCloud platform, we are able to run both a Facebook Application and a Facebook Connect Website for you simultaneously without additional management burden. So, essentially, you do not have to choose - you can run both. See Carolyn Hax on Facebook and on the Web.

For sites that run both, we suggest they use links to their Facebook application when promoting from within Facebook (pages or ads) and use links to their Facebook Connect Website when linking from their existing website, newsletters or other marketing materials.

Which is best? 

In general, we recommend that organizations promote their Facebook Connect Website because they are faster, have simpler web address URLs to share, offer more visual layout space and don't give advertising space away to Facebook.

Why do we require Facebook for people to use our community application?

In the future, we expect to allow for user's of our Website model to log in with other accounts via Twitter Connect, Open ID and user name / password models. The issue is that Facebook does a great job of authenticating users as real people with names and faces. This leads to more civil communities, the kind our partners want to encourage. Facebook authenticated communities have less spam and less abuse than open websites.

Our work has been generously funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and is freely available for open source download. You can read Facebook's own platform documentation here.

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

Read the previous post: Hosting the Open Source NewsCloud Platform.

Hosting the Open Source NewsCloud Facebook Platform

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

NewsCloud's open source Facebook platform can be hosted in a number of ways. 

The current codebase of NewsCloud is based on Ruby on Rails (here's why). You can download the latest daily code from Github anytime or download the last stable release (Release 2 is the most recent as of this post). The code is open source primarily because the platform has been built with a generous grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Here are several different approaches to hosting that may work for you right now (we're working on some future options - see below):

1) Dedicated Linux server. You can use a dedicated Linux server configured to run Ruby on Rails. We have a dedicated server at JohnCompanies.com. The cost there is about $125/mo. This gives you complete control of the resources and environment for your application. You will need a system administrator with strong technical skills and experience with Ruby on Rails to install and host your application.

2) Amazon AWS. We also run sites in the Amazon AWS cloud. Our platform currently requires a Large 64 bit Server Instance. If you purchase a 1 year or 3 year reserved instance you can save quite a bit on hourly expenses. Our AWS reserved instance cost about $1400 and we pay about $90 monthly to host it. A support contract costs extra. AWS provides a number of advantages in your hosting environment. However, AWS also requires a very sophisticated system administrator to configure and manage. 

3) Shared Virtual Server with root access. You can try running your site on a shared virtual server with Linux as long as you have root access. Virtual Linux Servers at JohnCompanies run about $40 - $60 per month. Your mileage may vary on how well this runs our application. You'll probably succeed with small sites (low traffic) but have to expand later to grow.

4) Hire NewsCloud to host the application for you. NewsCloud is glad to host, support and manage your application for you. The general cost for a fully managed application (not including editorial and community management) is about $500 per month for small to medium sized organizations. You can email us for more information. We generally tell organizations to budget between $10,000 - $12,000 for the first year of set up, training, design customization, hosting and support.

5) There is also an older version of NewsCloud based in PHP which is currently not being maintained. It is available at GitHub here.

Here are some options we're working on for the future:

1) Amazon AWS Micro Instance. Amazon's low resource Micro Instance is free for one year to new accounts. We are hoping to reconfigure our use of Ruby on Rails services and plugins to fit within the .613 GB memory footprint of the micro instance. This will allow new users to easily get started with our open source codebase, run a small site for a year and expand later if they are successful with the platform. We're also planning to provide easy to follow recipes and a pre-configured machine image to reduce the workload for users wishing to host on this platform. We expect to work on this in Q2 2011. Note: Expanding from the Micro Instance to a Large Server Instance will require some system administration work to move over the application. Update: Amazon now supports seamless switching between micro and large instances.

2) Heroku Cloud. We're hoping to also configure our application to run in the Heroku Cloud as a 1 dyno - this would allow you to run the basic site at no cost in the Heroku cloud (for very low testing usage). However, this will be a great environment for testing your application and then expanding expenses and resources to fit your requirements. Again, we'll try to provide easy installation recipes to reduce the complexity for adoption in this environment. A baseline application for public usage will probably cost about $180 per month at Heroku. Note: The free Heroku account will not provide support for background tasks (delivering notifications, importing newswire feeds) unless they are run as CRON jobs separately. The advantage of Heroku is that it's more easily expandable as your community grows than the Amazon Micro Instance.

We're often asked if you can run our platform on your own server or a shared server. We generally can't answer questions about your individual hosting environment but a good guideline is that you need root access to the server, you need significant memory ~ 1 GB and knowledge of installing and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications.

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

Read the next post in this series: Choosing between a Facebook Application and a Facebook Connect Website.

 

 

NewsCloud's Philosophy of Online Community Building and Social Media

This post is the first of a series about NewsCloud's philosophy of online community building and how organizations like yours can adopt our open source platform to launch vibrant social media sites.

For the past year, NewsCloud's been working with mainstream journalism organizations around the United States to help them adopt our open source Facebook platform. We've worked with organizations as small as New Jersey hyperlocal blog Baristanet and as large as The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Our work has been generously funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and is freely available for open source download.

While we're the first to admit that our platform continues to be a young, maturing social media platform, its capabilities are quite sophisticated and its ease of use and effectiveness continue to improve at a rapid pace. You can read a more complete summary of our platform's features here.

Our primary belief is that news organizations have evolved to favor a culture of one way publishing. In other words, they gather the news and publish it to their paper and website. They encourage readers to interact by sharing stories and adding comments, but that's about the extent of their vision and technical capacity. The NewsCloud platform has a bigger vision for news organizations' role.

Our platform is designed to help news organizations host vibrant communities for their readers to meet each other and engage with published content and also to generate and interact with their own content. Our integration with the Facebook platform helps readers see each other's names and faces and fosters a more civil environment than the web's typical anonymous content.

Some of the features we offer include end user blogs, discussion forums, questions and answers, a directory of resources, events, multimedia galleries, idea gathering and even a predictions game. A classifieds system which allows for lending of physical goods within communities is coming soon. You can see a prototype of a variety of these features at The Needle, a Seattle prototype news community.

A big part of our vision is for reporters to use these features as an integral part of their story coverage. So, for example, The Washington Post's advice columnist Carolyn Hax is creating resource directories of links relevant to her daily columns. We foresee reporters setting up idea gathering boards for ongoing series on civic issues or setting up prediction topics and questions on political stories, e.g. Will President Obama be re-elected?

While we've encountered a number of challenges working with media organizations who are all under the strain of increasing financial pressures and the shift to the Internet, the two biggest barriers we've seen are:

1) News organizations aren't able to grasp the potential of hosting this kind of community. It's too different from what they do today to warrant risky investments of staff time and resources. Despite the fact that our system can serve advertising from their existing systems and track statistics with their website's tracking engine, the organizations continue to see our platform as something separate from their website. They don't seem to grasp that they own the platform and will reap all the benefit from growing the community. So, the primary failure we continue to see is an unwillingness to promote the platform from their website on a regular basis. Most readers never discover their interactive community platform features and growth never occurs. Community growth takes sustained marketing and curation and most of our partners expect overnight success.

2) News organizations don't integrate the community features into their organizations. They never seem to grasp / educate and train reporters about the potential of using these features as part of the storytelling process. The opportunity to transition from one way publishing to truly interactive storytelling in which readers have an active engaged role never occurs.

A platform like ours is experimental. It's not always an easy path for our partners to work with our platform, but over time the site has become much more polished, sophisticated and powerful. The problem is that without regular promotion and without integration and experimentation by reporters, the opportunity to learn doesn't occur.

We hope to continue improving the platform over the next year and increasingly having more opportunities to experiment and learn. In the next post, I'll talk about what it takes to host our platform today and how we're planning to work to simplify this and make running an application even more affordable. Read the next post: Hosting the Open Source NewsCloud Platform.

If you're interested in learning more about our work, please visit our blog or email us.