NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

NewsCloud Presentation Slides from AEJMC 2011 in St. Louis

The slides from our presentation at AEJMC last week are below. Also, here are some of the additional links we mentioned about NewsCloud working with universities:

NewsCloud at the University of Washington in the classroom

NewsCloud in research with the University of Minnesota 

10 Things News Organizations Don't Understand About NewsCloud

During the past few years, we've partnered with a number of news organizations. Here are the 10 things they commonly misunderstand about NewsCloud. Note: #10 is actually the most important.

1) You can use NewsCloud to host a virtual town hall, fostering community and engagement between readers. Our interactive features let your audience participate in new ways. Our Facebook Connect support connects readers with their real names and faces, fostering a more civil environment. Host your community's online hub before someone else does.

2) You can use NewsCloud to enhance and expand your storytelling. Our crowdsourcing features let participants contribute to your reporting or add value after publication. Your readers want to engage beyond the comment thread, there's a lot to gain by empowering them.

3) You can use NewsCloud to run community sites for columnists or show personalities, for topics such as sports or for beat reporting or for targeting specific demographics such as young people or college communities. However, the more vertically you segment your community - the more you'll need to pay attention to #10 below. 

4) You can monetize your NewsCloud community with advertisements from your own ad services. And, you can integrate your favorite analytics/statistics engine e.g. Google Analytics or Overture in order to integrate activity from your community application into your overall web metrics. You fully own your site, not NewsCloud. So, you get to keep all the revenue. That's different than Facebook pages where Facebook gets to keep all the revenue it makes from your content. We also provide support for Outbrain and TrafficSpaces.

5. NewsCloud's software elevates your audience from reader to participant and community member. User generated content provides a new source of page views and serves as an ear to the ground for valuable story leads. Our integration with Facebook and Twitter lead to more viral sharing and helps you expand your audience.

6. NewsCloud's feature set includes unique Facebook-integrated classifieds which include a lending library for community members to share physical goods like DVDs and household items. In addition to user blogs, discussion forums and photo and video galleries, we've even got a news predictions game. Our optional email notifications keep participants engaged in the conversation.

7. Facebook pages are a great way to drive discussions off sites you own and onto Facebook. The best way to use your Facebook page is to link to activity pages on your NewsCloud application.

8. Newsroom staff need to participate in your community, helping curate content and occasionally interacting directly with readers. They should also be trained in using NewsCloud features to expand their storytelling. While high levels of marketing can seed a community without participation by newsroom personalities, you'll see increased levels of loyalty and satisfaction if your team engages directly in the community. You'll also see benefits from interacting with readers publicly through the community which aren't as easy to do through traditional website comment threads and personal off-site emails.

9. NewsCloud is available for free as open source software. It's funded by the Knight Foundation through April 2012. It can be installed in just a few steps by most software developers. You can also contact NewsCloud to manage it for you.

10. Promotion Promotion Promotion. The most important thing to know is that you absolutely must actively promote your NewsCloud site from your website if you want your community to grow. You'll need prominent navigational links to your NewsCloud site and features. You'll also need to regularly showcase headlines and features from your NewsCloud site on the front page of your web site. It's best if your NewsCloud site is included in all of your outreach e.g. print, email, web, etc. This is especially important at the beginning when you are seeding your community ... but this is always a best practice. While you may initially hesitate directing traffic from your primary web site to your NewsCloud community site, over time you will see a net increase in page views and activity. And, remember, you fully own your new community site and will realize all the financial rewards from its growth.

How Alternative Weeklies Can Use NewsCloud to Build Facebook Connected Communities

Update: Presentation slides from AAN2011 in New Orleans are available here: NewsCloud AAN 2011 Slides

NewsCloud is a free, open source platform for building Facebook Connect community applications and web sites.

There are primarily two ways we recommend alternative weeklies use NewsCloud:

1) Use NewsCloud to launch a virtual town hall providing a place for your readers to connect with each other. Add interactive features such as user blogs, photo and video galleries, link sharing and discussion forums to give your readers new ways to interact with each other. NewsCloud even offers a Classifieds and Lending Library which allows readers to share physical goods such as books, DVDs and household items.

NewsCloud's integration with Facebook Connect allows readers to connect with their real names and faces, greatly improving the civility of these sites. Move beyond generic Facebook pages (learn how NewsCloud differs from Facebook pages) and give your readers a community home that they can get truly excited about to share.

2) Use NewsCloud's crowdsourcing features to extend your storytelling, giving readers creative ways to get involved. Move beyond comments. Give your readers creative ways to get involved with and augment your reporting. NewsCloud offers crowdsourcing features such as idea boards, questions and answers, resource directories and even a news predictions game. Set up photo and video galleries, discussion forums and link to user blogs to extend the conversation.

Every NewsCloud feature is tightly integrated into Facebook and Twitter for viral sharing. It also integrates your statistical tracking and advertising engines to allow you to leverage these interactive page views into new sources of revenue. It's also fully optimized for search engines to draw inbound traffic.

The Knight Foundation has generously funded NewsCloud through April 2012. Already as part of this grant, we've got the installation of NewsCloud down to a few easy steps on a Rackspace server that costs less than $45/month.

Check out some of our existing prototype sites. Seattle's The Needle. Minnesota Public Radio's MinnEcon (as Facebook application). Carolyn Hax of The Washington Post (as Facebook application). The Boston Globe's Your Boston  (as Facebook application)

Hope to see you in New Orleans on Saturday. Or, contact us by email or visit our support site. 

NewsCloud coming to New Orleans and St. Louis

As part of the NewsCloud summer tour, we'll be presenting NewsCloud's open source social media platform at the Alt Weeklies AAN convention in New Orleans and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in St. Louis. Hope you can come see us.

Read about our recent Knight Foundation grant to make Facebook Connected Communities Easier and learn about how easy and affordable it is to run NewsCloud now.

Easy install for NewsCloud

Update: The great folks at RackSpace are offering six months credited (a.k.a. free) services for hosting NewsCloud in the Rackspace Cloud.

NewsCloud can now be installed quickly, easily and affordably in just a few steps. Watch the video and follow the steps below:

1. Choose a server. Use an existing server or sign up for a hosting account. We recommend Rackspace's 1 GB Cloud server (configured with Linux Ubuntu 10.04) which costs $45/month (first six months can be credited, making it free). Make note of your server's IP address.

2. Point your domain name at your server. You can use an existing domain e.g. www.yoursite.com or any subdomain e.g. newscloud.yoursite.com or register a new domain. Learn more about mapping your domain name to your server.

3. Register for a Facebook application. Sign up for a Facebook application and configure it with your domain name. Make note of your application's secret keys.

4. Install NewsCloud. We've simplified the installation scripts to just a few lines. Note: be sure your computer is configured properly with Ruby on Rails. Also, here is a summary of the settings you'll need before you run the script.

> git clone git://github.com/newscloud/n2.git
> cd n2
> cap newscloud:run 

Visit your website (e.g. www.yoursite.com) to see your fresh NewsCloud installation, then use our wizards to customize it at your administrative dashboard (e.g. www.yoursite.com/admin). This customization checklist may be helpful.

During the coming year, we will continue to make the NewsCloud platform simpler to install, customize, manage and moderate. Our work is funded through April 30, 2012 with the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Stay tuned to this blog or follow us on Twitter (see button below)  for updates.

Follow @newscloud on Twitter

Run NewsCloud at Rackspace for $45 per month

We've just released an installation script for a $45 monthly Rackspace Cloud account. It also works great on any Ubuntu 10.04 Linux server. If you've been waiting for an affordable hosting solution for NewsCloud, check it out.

NewsCloud Latest Release Runs on Rails 2.3.11

Read about Release 3.1's migration to Ruby on Rails 2.3.11. Hopefully this will make it a bit easier for developers to try out our code than the earlier version.

News Orgs: Leverage Facebook But Don't Sacrifice Independence

Amy Gahran has a great post inspired by Scott Rosenberg pointing out that news organizations and journalists may be overrelying on Facebook, even giving up ownership of valued real estate and content. Honestly, I've never read a better argument for our Knight-funded open source platform, NewsCloud.

Says Rosenberg, "By moving so much of the conversation away from their own websites and out to Facebook, media companies are basically saying, ‘We did a lousy job of engaging readers under our own roof, so we’re going to encourage it to happen on someone else’s turf.’”

Says Gahran, "I do think news orgs should have a strong presence in the social media that are popular with their communities. But don’t make this an excuse to slack off on adapting your own tools, culture, and systems to engage more effectively on your own digital 'turf.'"

She continues: "The architecture of Facebook is also still mostly a 'walled garden'—much of the content and interaction is not easily or universally findable or linkable. This is appropriate for interpersonal social networking, but it makes less sense from a publisher’s perspective. It can make valuable content associated with your brand harder to find, track, and keep."

What NewsCloud Provides

What NewsCloud provides is an open source suite of tools for hosting interactive features simultaneously on Facebook applications and as Facebook Connect Websites (learn more about these). News organizations can leverage Facebook authentication and identity while essentially extending their own websites with NewsCloud and maintain complete ownership. They can even plug in their own advertising engine, statistical tracking and index the content with search engines.

If a reporter wants to gather ideas from readers, they can use our idea board. If they want to add a fun predictions game to a sports topic, they can use our predictions feature. If they want to collect crowdsourced links related to a particular story or topic, they can use our directory feature. These are just a few examples.

We've been shocked that news organizations are turning over their comment engines to proprietary Facebook plugins, giving ownership control and the advantages of open search to Facebook. NewsCloud is the kind of solution that provides integration with social media while maintaining openness and control.

NewsCloud allows news organizations to dramatically upgrade their websites with interactive social media connected features at very low cost. 

Ready to learn more? Start with our community guide to the platform

 

 

 

NewsCloud to Make Facebook-Connected Communities Easy

For Immediate Release: May 4, 2011
You can also read this release at the Knight Foundation's Website

NewsCloud to Make Facebook-Connected Communities Easy
Knight Foundation grant will support improved simplicity and affordability
in innovative open source technology
 

SEATTLE, WA. — Social media developer  NewsCloud will make its open source Facebook-connected platform easier and more affordable for communities and news organizations. The project is being made possible by a $190,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

For the last year, NewsCloud has launched Facebook-connected community applications for organizations as large as The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. “Cost and complexity remain the greatest barriers to adoption by a wider array of news and community organizations,” said Jeff Reifman, NewsCloud Founder. “With this grant, we’re going to eliminate these barriers and deliver an affordable turnkey solution.”

According to Facebook statistics, there are more than 500 million active Facebook members, who collectively spend 700 billion minutes per month on the service. To build informed and engaged online communities, developers like NewsCloud have to pair interactive community features closely with Facebook. NewsCloud’s platform connects users to one another with features such as blogging, forums, multimedia galleries, a predictions game, classifieds, questions and answers, idea gathering, and more.

“The new version of NewsCloud will be especially useful to local community news sites and community foundations supporting local journalism,” said Jose Zamora, Knight Foundation Journalism Program Associate. “NewsCloud’s next iteration will allow organizations interested in integrating their sites with Facebook to do it without having to invest in technical support. It will allow them to use social networks to increase their reach, inform, engage and interact with their communities online. The platform also opens new revenue opportunities for news sites of any size.”

NewsCloud plans to deliver the first iteration of its simplified, turnkey software by September 2011. Improvements will continue through April 2012. “Not only will the next release be easier to set up, manage and populate with content, but you can host it for less than $100 per month,” says Reifman. Software developers can install the current NewsCloud software used by larger news organizations by visiting http://opensource.newscloud.com.

The Knight Foundation has funded NewsCloud’s research efforts and development since 2008. Research into the engagement of young people with news in Facebook is available at http://newscloud.com/research. NewsCloud’s recent report on its work with news organizations is available here. 

About NewsCloud

Launched in 2005, NewsCloud provides a robust open source community engagement platform for news and community organizations. The NewsCloud source code is available free to download. Visit opensource.newscloud.com or follow @newscloud on Twitter for additional information and updates.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation 

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation invests in journalism excellence worldwide and in the vitality of U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950, the foundation has granted more than $400 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. Knight Foundation focuses on projects with the potential to create transformational change. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

Contact: 

Marc Fest, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, (305) 908-2677, fest@knightfoundation.org

Jeff Reifman, NewsCloud, jeff@newscloud.com

 

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.