NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

How easy and affordable is a NewsCloud Facebook Community site right now?

We've created a status page which we'll regularly update showing the ways to host a NewsCloud community at the current time. As we move forward with our simplicity and affordability roadmap, we'll keep this page updated with new options.

Release 3 of NewsCloud Facebook Community Platform is Now Available

Get the code for our third stable release of the NewsCloud Ruby on Rails platform - learn more at our open source blog.

Our next open source release is coming soon...

Release 3 stable is almost here... 

Minnesota Public Radio Launches Economic Beat Reporting Site on the NewsCloud platform

This guest post is written by Minnesota Public Radio's public insight journalist Paul Tosto:

    When Minnesota Public Radio News launched the MinnEcon blog  two years ago, we wanted to capture the everyday stories of Minnesotans living through the Great Recession. We had good success finding stories via our Public Insight Network. But early on it was clear the old blog format didn’t fit our ambitions.

    We wanted to create a networked hub of beat reporting, a site that didn’t just tell readers to leave a comment at the bottom of a post but invited them to ask and answer questions, easily share anything that interested them about the economy and create or jump in to discussions. We started working with NewsCloud last fall to build that site using its open source platform.

    The result: A remade MinnEcon that integrates social media, public insight and MPR News reporting -- from radio stories to news shows to all the stuff we do already online.

    The site went up officially a couple of weeks ago. Soon, we'll reach out to the thousands of Minnesotas in the MPR News network who’ve responded in the past to our queries about the economy and connect them to the site.

    With MinnEcon, we're building something with the NewsCloud open source platform that could become a standard beat reporting tool: A flexible app that's easy to set up and configure to specific beats, easy to run and connected to Facebook, the world's largest social network.

    It can easily be maintained by a beat reporter and editor. That's one of the real beauties of this project. There’s enormous potential to reproduce the model for any beat and any reporter, no matter the size of the news organization.

The NewsCloud open source Facebook community platform is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Anyone can download the code for free. Follow us @newscloud.

News Challenge Update: Platform for an Audience Member Economy is a Finalist

Update: Our entry in the Knight Foundation's 2011 News Challenge, Platform for Building and Managing an Audience Membership Economy (pdf), is now one of 24 finalists. About 10 to 12 finalists will be selected as winners to be announced in June. Congratulations and best of luck to all our fellow finalists! And, kudos to all who care enough about journalism and technology to enter!

Our concept is to provide a suite of tools for news organizations to generate revenue from building a market between readers and businesses/advertisers; our goal is to help news organizations move away from cluttered, low margin banner advertising and towards high margin transactions that actually provide benefits to readers.

We've deepened our proposal and are pleased The Seattle Times has jumped on board as a lead partner to work with us on the project if we should be lucky enough to win. You can read our more detailed final proposal here: Platform for Building and Managing an Audience Membership Economy (easier to read pdf)

 

Knight Foundation News Challenge Deadline is December 1, 2010

If you have an innovative media technology idea, you might be able to get funding from the Knight News Challenge contest.

Run by the Knight Foundation, the grant competition awards up to $5 million annually for innovative projects that use digital technology to transform the way communities send, receive and make use of news and information.

More info can be found here: http://newschallenge.org. The site includes application information, as well as details about past winners.

This year’s application deadline is December 1. The News Challenge is looking for applications in four categories: mobile, authenticity, sustainability and community.  All projects must make use of digital technology to distribute news in the public interest.

The contest is open to anyone in the world.

A simple description of the project is all you need to apply. Submit a brief pitch to http://newschallenge.org. If the reviewers like it, you’ll be asked to submit a full proposal later.

If you have questions you can a) reference the FAQ:http://www.newschallenge.org/frequently-asked-questions, or; b) check the archived chat transcript here: http://www.newschallenge.org/1026-live (another live chat will be held 1:30 p.m. Nov. 18 at newschallenge.org)

You can follow Knight Foundation at http://twitter.com/knightfdn. The News Challenge Twitter hashtag is #knc

 

Another Explanation for WikiLeak's Loss in the News Challenge Contest

After reading some of the commentaries on WikiLeak's loss in the NewsChallenge contest, I want to offer another possible explanation and a suggestion.

First, a few disclosures and comments: NewsCloud has received two Knight Foundation grants (outside of the News Challenge) for research and Facebook. I have entered and lost in the News Challenge in two separate years. I have just returned from the News Challenge announcement and Knight Foundation MIT conference on the Future of News and Civic Media in Boston. I have never discussed WikiLeaks with anyone at the conference or at the foundation. After working with the foundation for two years and attending several conferences where I've had an opportunity to meet in person and spend time socially with some of its employees, I count some of them as friends. I also know Noam Cohen, the New York Times reporter who wrote the above story, and also count him a friend though I have not discussed his article with him.

The NewsChallenge Bias Towards Single Geographic Communities

The NewsChallenge is an extremely competitive contest and although its judging criteria and contest format change slightly each year, one thing I've noticed is that it strongly favors applications that use a specific local community to run trials, learn from and prove models for strengthening access to information, engagement and democracy. Last year, I received rejection letters for all three of my entries saying they were not specifically focused on a geographic community even though I thought that I had focused enough on emphasizing local trials in a group of areas. I regularly have advised colleagues that ask me to review their entries to choose a single geographic community as a trial and focus on that for the News Challenge entry. 

Choosing a single geographic community often helps minimize your budget request, speed results from your trial and forces you to think about structuring your idea in a way that could be replicable.

I don't think the Foundation regularly invests in platform solutions that can be generally applied to any community ... as a technologist, I kind of wish they would focus on this more deeply ... but I think they have an institutional orientation around ideas that have proven themselves working in a specific geographical community. 

While there are probably counter-examples (even in the list of past News Challenge winners), Vermont's Front Porch Forum is a perfect example of this. It's a service that has shown success by providing private email listserves for neighbors. It's not necessarily cutting-edge technology, not necessarily news oriented, but it's strengthening connections within Vermont communities and in an age of Facebook-privacy violations it's creating a safe, private space for neighbors to relate to each other with just email. As its founder, Michael Wood Lewis said this week, "We hope that people spend as little time as possible on our service." How many tech-titans might say that? Perhaps these social innovations are the kinds the news challenge wants to see more of.

Another example of this might be News Challenge winner One-Eight, which will approach reporting from our nearly decade long Afghanistan war using embedded journalism and social media entries from a single battalion.

After reading an excerpt of the WikiLeaks entry, my guess is that it failed to win because it lacked focus on a specific geographic community.

A Suggestion to WikiLeaks

After my first news challenge entry made the second round but was rejected, I emailed the folks at Knight and asked them for more feedback. I wanted to learn how to do better next time. Later, I approached them outside the news challenge to discuss new projects. Those discussions led to both of NewsCloud's grants. I'd like to suggest WikiLeaks now do the same. 

I don't think the Knight Foundation shrinks from controversy. I do think that like any foundation, they have a variety of areas of grant making in which they like to do things a certain way. The NewsChallenge may not be the most appropriate venue for funding WikiLeaks' next step forward.

In closing, I'd like to say that personally, I think WikiLeaks has done a great service to our nation by providing increased transparency of how our money is being spent on military actions overseas. The military industrial complex is thriving in our post 9-11 world and it's sucking vital funds from our domestic needs. I'd like to see the Obama administration release all of these videos ... and the drone attack videos for that matter. Americans need to see the actions that are done in their name with taxpayer dollars. It's especially relevant because our tactics seem to be successfully used as recruitment tools that make our goals more elusive.

As I passed through security at Logan Airport last night - removing my shoes, taking off my belt, emptying my pockets and assuming for the first time the position of hands raised above my head that I see criminals do in cop shows so that I could be more clearly radiated by the backscatter security machine whose health effects I am not certain of, I realized again how obvious it is that the terrorists are winning.

Facebook Burning Through Its Most Valuable Asset

I earn my living from Facebook and am usually one of the platform's biggest advocates. As part of NewsCloud's Knight Foundation grant, I regularly evangelize Facebook applications to media companies and publishers.  But Facebook's increasingly hostile policies toward end user privacy keeps making my job more difficult than it should be.

Facebook's Most Valuable Asset is the Trust of its Users

Venture investors often focus on the burn rate of a startup to determine how long a company can operate before it becomes profitable. After last week, investors in Facebook should be asking how long the company can continue its phenomenal growth as it quickly burns through the trust of users that expected the company to protect their privacy. See How Facebook Is Putting It's Users Last (CNet), Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information (EFF) and Facebook’s Instant Personalization Is the Real Privacy Hairball (GigaOm).

It's awkward critiquing Facebook for its recent anti-privacy moves while Microsoft's running sexting ads to promote its new phone to teenagers and dodging taxes in deficit-ridden Washington State and Apple's getting the cops to bust Gizmodo, banning cross-platform application frameworks and beating up on Ellen Degeneres. It's not like the company's leaking thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Instead, it's leaking information its end users expect to be private into the hands of preferred partners, application developers and advertisers while refusing to provide plain language explanations of the impact of its practices to end users.  

Facebook's a Repeat Privacy Offender

Facebook has stumbled before. After a huge public relations gaffe, the company usually backtracks and the protest de jour dies down. See Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline (EFF) and Growth of Facebook and Privacy Events (BoingBoing).

Recently, Google amazed me when after all of Facebook's privacy gaffe's and backtracking, it made many of the same mistakes and more with Google Buzz. Google tried to design a product that would give them an upper hand against Twitter and Facebook - regardless of the benefits or concerns of such a product to end users.

Now, I've even more amazed that after Google's Buzz debacle, Facebook has drawn a line in the sand against common sense and the basic privacy expectations of its growing user base with its new social graph.

Just as Microsoft employees, incredibly, seemed to think they could surreptitiously market exploitative sexting ads to teens by using a male rather than a female, Facebook thinks that it can sustain its growth while essentially pimping the private lives of its users to the highest bidder. There seems to be no adult supervision at either company.

Apparently, Facebook has calculated that it's exponentially more lucrative to sell off its users' private profiles to advertisers than charging a fair price for providing aspects of its utilitarian service, that of helping people keep up with friends and family. As a comparison, Flickr, Yahoo's social photo sharing service, has posted consistent profits by charging a reasonable fee to advanced users.

Facebook's investors should be shocked by the lack of creativity in its business development team. Only this group could weigh the good will of 400 million users and determine the best way to make money here is by surreptitiously selling their private details to advertisers. Worse yet, Facebook seems to be deliberately failing to communicate these changes clearly to users. Global class action attorneys are drooling as they quantify the monetary damages caused by the leakage of our affiliations and interests.

The drive for Google-sized profit may have originated with Microsoft's $240 million investment (a tiny fraction of that company's cash on hand) for a tiny, almost meaningless share of Facebook. I suspected at the time it was only partly to broaden distribution of Microsoft's Silverlight Media Player, but more importantly to implant a poison pill into the long term capitalization of Facebook. Microsoft's investment valued Facebook at $15 billion dollars. In order to grow Facebook without a down round of financing, Facebook would have to set its revenue aspirations through the roof. There would be no Flickr-like, slow growth approach. In fact, Facebook's anti-privacy, anti-consumer efforts provide cover for Microsoft's own business practices - it's also one of Facebook's initial instant personalization partners.

The Technorati are Pissed

Many blogs are publishing guides to opting out of Facebook's privacy sharing and deleting your account. Check out Lotus founder Mitch Kapor's recent retweet of a Twitter investor:

I agree that the scale of the recent $65 million settlement with ConnectU goes beyond typical corporate risk management and calls into question the relative ethics of a younger Mark Zuckerberg. See Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook. Facebook and Zuckerberg might be wise to imitate Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page and recruit a more experienced executive (similar to Google CEO Eric Schmidt) to lead the company.

At 29, I was CEO of a comparably miniscule internet startup. I remember being pushed by older directors and attorneys to take common corporate steps towards profitability that often conflicted in varying degrees with my instincts and traditional ethical values . It's easy to stumble. I think Zuckerberg has.

Facebook made another big change last week that did not receive as much attention. After spending the last couple of years pushing businesses and celebrities to create Pages, Facebook's created identical Facebook-owned search pages using content from Wikipedia. In its efforts to become a walled garden its users never have to leave to search the Web, its pissing off thousands of Facebook Page owners by essentially competing with them and confounding users.

Should Media Companies Adopt the Facebook Social Graph?

Currently, I'm advising larger companies to hold off on adding Facebook's social graph features to their Web sites. I believe there is substantial downside to associating your brand with Facebook in the midst of what I expect will be a growing controversy. Until Facebook reverses course, I would not want to have my company viewed as complicit in promoting these kinds of confusing opt-out privacy practices. If I was the CEO at Yelp or Pandora, I'd consider pulling out as an early adopter.

It's important for media companies to recognize that the products and policies they launch on the Internet make statements about their brand and their company's vision for how the Internet should operate in the future. It's important for companies to have a long term vision for the web that advocates for their customers and reflects today's common sense values of our culture. 

Facebook's More Vulnerable Than It Realizes

Ironically, Facebook's promotion of Facebook Connect as a universal authentication system has made its platform more vulnerable to alternative solutions. Our open source NewsCloud application technology runs as a Facebook application but also as a website with Facebook Connect. It would be quite easy for our partners to migrate from Facebook's closed application platform and its authentication system to our web solution using an open authentication system like OpenId. Our system is not actually very dependent on the Facebook platform.

A colleague of mine shared concerns that one company such as Facebook could control so many of the basic use cases of the Web. But, really, Facebook is the first successful delivery of an aggregation of common utility features users long ago discovered on the Internet e.g. email, chat, photos, microblogging, relationship management, etc. Similarly, Twitter is also a utility for a form of communication and broadcasting, like RSS before it and in some ways SMS instant messaging and email.

Utilities generally become commodities over time. In 1900, electricity was the killer app, today it's broadband...soon it may be some amalgamation of email, Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare. Twitter already has an open platform competitor in Status.net. It provides features that Twitter will never likely offer. If Google had provided native support for open microblogging services instead of launching Buzz, it might have Twitter on the ropes today.

Coincidentally, on the day Google released its allegedly open, supposed Facebook-platform killer "Open Social", I published a piece called "Breaking Open Facebook with Open Source Software" (Part 1 can now be found here, Part 2 here) which appeared in Sys-Con Journals and Slashdot.

If Facebook continues to squander the trust and good will of its users, it will stoke the fires of innovation that drive developers to create more open initiatives such as I described. Think Firefox to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

If I was the CEO of Google or Microsoft, I'd be supporting open technology development specifically towards breaking the backs of upstarts like Facebook and Twitter rather than self-serving, proprietary Buzz-like initiatives. In the long run, you can't go wrong providing easy to use, seamless solutions that benefit end users.

Applications such as TweetDeck, HootSuite and FourSquare and the success of the iPhone and Android application platforms hint at a future in which competitors to many of the services Facebook offers could be easily aggregated for end users in mobile applications and web sites. The distributed nature of the Internet and the creativity of web developers is likely to kick Facebook's butt over time. All that it has going for it is the good will and loyalty of its end users. Apple would be wise to reflect on this about now as well.

I respectfully hope that Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and company do the right thing and back down from this precipitous, anti-consumer, anti-privacy ledge.

Sometimes Daily's Amanda Congdon Interviews NewsCloud Founder on Microsoft Tax Dodge

NewsCloud founder Jeff Reifman has been reporting on Microsoft's $1.24 billion dollar tax dodge since 2004 but increasingly this year as Washington States $2.6 billion budget deficit comes up for debate.

This week, Internet video reporter and former ABC News contributor and Rocketboom anchor Amanda Congdon interviewed Jeff on the topic of Microsoft's Nevada tax practice. 

Although Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has committed to transparent business practices the company has so far refused to open its Washington State and Nevada tax records. 3,088 Washington taxpayers pay the B&O Royalty tax that Microsoft evades.

For more information, please visit the Microsoft Tax Dodge website and be sure to follow AmazingAmanda and SometimesDaily on Twitter!

Evan Ratliff on Vanish Contest-Related Media and Upcoming Wired Article: "Gone"

As we've mentioned before, NewsCloud's Facebook application technology was used to help capture Evan Ratliff in Wired Magazine's summer Vanish contest. The application was built as part of a research project funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Evan's story, "Gone",  will appear soon (Nov 23) in December's Wired Magazine. He has an interesting media wrap up on his blog which highlights how widespread interest was in the contest. Apparently, he is now calling me his "nemesis".

He appeared last night on CNN to discuss the story with Campbell Brown and an NPR interview with Alex Cohen (which includes me and Jeff Leach from Naked Pizza who found Evan in New Orleans) is scheduled for Saturday's Weekend Edition:

The clip of the December Wired's cover on CNN looks striking and intriguing. So, pick up a copy of Gone at your local newsstand - from the little I've heard of Evan's travels, I expect it'll be a great read.