NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

Good Reads: Why Our Startup Decided Not To Target the Newspaper Industry

"As the co-founder of a technology startup that once considered the news industry as a source of partnerships and revenue, I agree with Wilson that startups should look elsewhere. However, the reason they should do so is not because the media industry lacks problems that need to be solved. If anything, the media industry has problems that span every sector of the industry and every segment of the value chain. Rather, the reason why startups should look for other opportunities is many industry problems are so intractable, and the chance for making a successful business is so slim, that it simply doesn't make sense to target it." Read the full article

 

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.

WordPress Plugin for SurfShare

We've added a WordPress plugin for bloggers who want to try out our SurfShare micropayment platform. If you are interested, visit the SurfShare WordPress Plugin Page for more information and download.

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.

Google Quietly Closes AdSense API to Small Publishers

Google has raised the required minimum traffic limit for publishers who wish to use its AdSense API to 100,000 page views per day. The AdSense API was introduced in March as a way for sites with user generated content to share advertising revenue with their members. Says Google, "This policy change will probably result in fewer developers going live and give us a chance to enhance our support resources and processes to more easily support a greater number of developers in the future...we hope to be able to lower it in the future as we become more efficient at supporting our developers!" Meanwhile, some publishers report waiting a month for their API usage to be approved. I take Google at its word for now but worry that small developers could be increasingly squeezed out of the mashup space if this were to become a trend.

Technorati Tags: adsense, adsense api, facebook, google

Social Signal Offers to Support NewsCloud Outreach

Social Signal announced today its offer to work with NewsCloud expanding our outreach efforts with NGOs:

That's why we've decided to extend the same offer of pro bono support to one of the projects that isn't in the room today. Next month, we'll start working with Newscloud, an open source media platform that combines news sharing and social networking. ...

Using Newscloud, an organization's members and supporters can identify the news stories that matter to them, annotate those stories with their own reflections, and collaboratively create a window on the day's issues that reflect their interests and priorities. Individual users may find Newscloud compelling too -- quite apart from the social benefits of collaboratively surfacing interesting stories, it's got a great interface for reading blogs and news sites that displays stories as they appear on the originating site, rather than as plain or reformatted text. The best way to understand Newscloud's value is to visit the Newscloud site, sign up for an account (it's very quick!) and take it for a spin yourself. ...

We're going to work with Jeff to make it easier for non-profits to integrate Newscloud's features directly into their own web sites. Working from our own experience developing non-profit sites on the Drupal platform, we're going to help Jeff develop a Newscloud Drupal module, so that the thousands of community sites now running Drupal can integrate Newscloud-enabled news sharing directly into their sites.

I'm very appreciative of Alexandra's generous offer to work with us on this effort.

if you're a developer and want to learn more about NewsCloud, check out the NewsCloud Wiki or our NewsCloud Web Services API documentation.

Technorati Tags: drupal, newscloud, social signal

Announcing the NewsCloud Wiki and Developer Forum

We've launched our NewsCloud Wiki to help NewsCloud users who want to take advantage of our more advanced features as well as developers who want to learn more about our project or its web services. We've also set up a developer discussion forum.

Please check it out and let us know what you think. You can email us here.

Technorati Tags: wiki, newscloud, developer forum

Save Stories to NewsCloud from Bloglines

If you use the Firefox Web browser, you can now add stories to NewsCloud directly from Bloglines. This makes it a lot easier to add news to your feed.

1. Install the Greasemonkey Firefox extension.
2. Restart Firefox
3. Open up the Bloglines Save to NewsCloud script in the browser
4. From the Firefox menu, select Tools > Install User Script...or you may be able to click the install button if it appears on the page.
5. Visit Bloglines and refresh the page, you should see the Save to NewsCloud link beside each blog entry

You will need to log in to NewsCloud before you start using Bloglines for this script to work. If Bloglines changes their Web code significantly, the script may stop working.

Please send us feedback or let us know if the script stops working.

Technorati Tags: bloglines, firefox, greasemonkey, save to newscloud