NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

Rails 3 and Design Upgrade Almost Done

We're putting the finishing touches on our Rails 3 upgrade and site design updates. We'll have more details soon...

Part time gigs at NewsCloud

Check out a list of paid (or volunteer) open source jobs for the NewsCloud platform. More coming soon...

Try NewsCloud Free for Six Months at Rackspace

First we made NewsCloud easy to install, then we made it cheap, now we're making it free to get started building a social media community for your favorite topic, neighborhood, city or school:

The generous folks at Rackspace are offering six months of credited hosting (up to $250 monthly) for anyone hosting NewsCloud in the Rackspace Cloud through their startup program. Now, there's no reason not to try your hand at launching your own social media community.

To get running, just follow these signup and installation steps. Then, send in the Rackspace Promotional Discount Agreement to activate your six months of credited hosting. Be sure to email us so we can tell you how to turn on the "Powered by Rackspace" text in your site footer.

While most content management systems are optimized around publishing, NewsCloud's features offer ways for your audience to participate and lead the site with user generated content. As activity increases, you can integrate advertising and paid content referral systems to capture new revenue streams. We also offer some innovative ways to populate your site with content from RSS and Twitter Lists.

NewsCloud is a free, open source project funded by the great folks at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Read more about our Knight-funded research into the engagement of young people in news in Facebook.

Questions? Visit our support community or email us. Be sure to follow us on Twitter @newscloud.

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."

Value of Pages for Businesses and Like Buttons Diminished in New Facebook Design

Interesting comments in the Puget Sound Business Journal - this is sort of what Facebook did to application developers with notifications ... which is one of the reasons we're moving NewsCloud away from native canvas applications and moving towards using Facebook as just another authentication provider:

Before, when a user clicked the “like” or “recommend” buttons on a business’s page, anyone viewing that user’s news feed would see that the user likes that business or product. Same with comments posted to a business page. But Eckert says those aren't showing up in personal feeds anymore when clicked through Facebook, though they do appear in feeds when clicked through the businesses’ website.

“The ‘like’ button is being marginalized,” says Dave Ringler, Blind Acre’s director of marketing and product development. “How are businesses going to stay in front of their followers’ friends?”

It also means businesses will have to give more consideration to how they use “like” buttons on their websites.

 

Using Twitter to Launch Your News Community Application on Facebook

    When I was a child, I used to love Sea Monkeys. You'd just add the magic powder to a bowl of water and the next day you'd have tiny little baby sea monkeys swimming around. Starting up a social media news community in Facebook has always been harder, until now.

    Beginning today, you can take NewsCloud's free, open source Facebook application platform and create a community site with news content from Twitter.

    There are two big challenges to creating a community news startup. 1) Aggregating relevant, timely news content for your site and 2) Promoting and marketing your site. NewsCloud's new Twitter integration address the first challenge.

How It Works

    You choose a topic for your NewsCloud Facebook application. e.g. Seattle or Baseball. Then, you create a Twitter List with Twitter users you believe do a good job of focusing on this topic area. When you set up your NewsCloud site, you can tell it to populate content automatically from this Twitter List. NewsCloud will appropriately filter tweets from news related sites (you can white list and black list sites to further control for relevance) and publish these to your site with links back to the Twitter users that posted the content in the first place.

    You can see an example of this at The Needle, using our example Twitter list for Seattle. Your NewsCloud site will pull in content from Twitter users you choose and select stories that come from relevant news sites. You can create your own Twitter List, curating your favorite twitterers for your site topic or region. Or, you can use someone else's existing Twitter List. It's about as simple as growing sea monkeys.

    We'd love to see you set up your own topical or hyperlocal community using our free, open source Facebook technology and give us feedback on this new feature. To be successful, you'll still need to promote your community actively, but this is a great way to leverage Twitter to seed your community with interesting and relevant stories from day one.

    While NewsCloud also can automatically add stories from RSS feeds, we feel that using Twitter lists with members you curate is more effective at finding higher quality content. RSS feeds tend to firehose too many stories and are less personal. Also, the presentation of Twitter content on your community site highlights the personalities and profile pictures of each Twitter user. Whereas, RSS feeds are posted by a single user account.

    This is a very early release of this feature. We're curious what you think about it. Please share your feedback on our discussion page.

 

Saint Petersburg iUni Presentation

Update: Photos available here.

Thank you for the excellent turnout tonight. Here are the presentation slides:

India News Site is Latest to Use NewsCloud

Check out Indiali.com (on Facebook as an app here), the latest Facebook application powered by NewsCloud's free, open source software. The Indiali news community began as a Facebook page and has grown to have 3.3 million fans. Indiali's using NewsCloud to improve the quality of community features that they can offer.

As we've discussed before on this blog, Facebook pages are quite limited and don't offer a way for news startups to monetize their traffic.

If you want to learn more about Indiali, you can find its founder Aravind Chandreasekaran on Facebook or contact him through the application.

NewsCloud's free open source Facebook software is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through April 2012. NewsCloud can be installed easily in minutes and hosted for less than $45 per month.

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.