NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

Spotlight on our News Challenge Entry: Platform for an Audience Member Economy

The inspiration for NewsCloud’s News Challenge entry, Connection: Platform for an Audience Member Economy, now a finalist, struck in the spring of 2009 at an intimate dinner gathering of technology executives invited to brainstorm on the business challenges faced by a large national newspaper, which I was asked not to name. I and another executive highlighted the scope of opportunities provided by building technology to leverage the data the company already knew about its subscribers. Yet, I could tell as we spoke that this concept was a bit beyond the technical and conceptual grasp of our hosts. The idea stuck in my head until I decided to enter it in the 2010-2011 News Challenge.

There’s still a huge disconnect today between the way most news organizations try to generate revenue and what their readers want. Splash and interstitial ads, video pre-roll, pop-overs and pop-unders are some of the most annoying Internet revenue models yet publishers seem to be accelerating their use. Yet, it’s fairly clear at this point that revenue from online advertising isn’t sufficient to sustain quality journalism. The combined ignorance to the reader’s experience and lack of innovation in the online journalism business model is disappointing. 

Only recently are we starting to see some experimental efforts at subscription paywalls. While we’re supportive of these efforts, paywalls, by nature, reduce the number of readers informed and engaged by your content.

We believe that the core value news organizations have is the monopoly of audience eyeballs that visit their sites on a regular basis for great content. This monopoly generally stems from legacy distribution of newspapers in major markets. This is a huge competitive advantage and yet there are few tools helping newspapers strategically leverage this advantage.

The Knight News Challenge provided four different categories for innovation: Mobile, Authenticity, Sustainability and Community. Our entry targets sustainability of journalism at newspapers by surgically focusing on building a platform for expanding sources of revenue that leverage this core asset.

Partnership with The Seattle Times

Our idea was good enough to excite the good folks at The Seattle Times, Seattle’s 115 year old daily print newspaper with Sunday circulation of 1,248,500 adults. If we’re fortunate to win the News Challenge, we’ll work closely with The Times business team (partnership pdf) to build an open source system that reflects the requirements of a large daily news organization and helps us learn what works and what doesn’t.

We will work closely with their team to plan, develop, deploy and evolve our project features. Ultimately, our primary work product will be an open source platform that other news organizations can adopt for themselves.

What We Will Build 

Our idea is unique in that we’re trying to move publishers away from a banner advertising model towards a platform that helps them provide a useful service to their audience. Readers don’t need to be bombarded by ads when they read the news but they probably could use a little help finding the best products, services and deals.

We’re constructing a new online economy by providing a platform for an online marketplace between news organizations, businesses and their audience. This hasn't been done before.

News organizations already know a lot about their audience. They routinely promote aggregate demographic data to their advertisers. We’re simply taking this to the next level. We’re using the benefit of online tracking, opt-in data collection and Facebook Connect to help news organizations provide a useful service to readers while earning money from businesses that want to reach them.

The project actually consists of four different websites: 1) Website for readers to manage their participation in the system, purchase subscriptions and individual coupons and browse the affiliate store and book and movie clubs. 2) A mobile website for readers with smartphones to access these features on the go. 3) Website for businesses to browse aggregated demographics and potential offers and to purchase and manage coupon placement or engagement contracts within the system. 4) Backend administrative website for the media company to create and manage offers, coupons, payments, monitor statistics, track revenue, and manage communication and support with members and businesses.

We’ll also provide the following components, each a building block in the overall platform:

The most unique part of the system enables the new online marketplace economy between businesses and readers. It's essentially an offer creation and pricing system for the media company to proactively match businesses to specific groups of audience members that have opted in. The media company can price these contacts based on their perceived market value. Offers will be managed and sent via email through the system, linking businesses to readers. The system will fully manage and track payments and redemptions giving the media company full control and ownership of these transactions and relationships. 

For example, the system will allow media companies to sell the right of car dealers to send unique offers to readers who have opted in and shared that are in the market for a new car. It will allow pet food delivery companies to contact readers that have opted in and shared that they own dogs or cats. Or, diaper and childcare services to reach parents, electronics retailers to reach HDTV shoppers, etc. The potential connections are endless.

Second, we’ll provide an online coupon system available via subscription. This is similar to print coupon books, which are purchased annually. Subscribers will be able to regularly browse and use an online coupon guide from participating businesses. We’ll provide components for managing the coupons including purchase, payment, authentication and redemption.

Third, the coupon management components we build for the above listed features will allow us to provide a deals system similar to Groupon, Living Social and a variety of third party services which are now working with newspapers. However, the media companies will be able to offer these directly to businesses without having to share a transaction cost with the service provider.

Fourth, we’ll provide a product of the month club so media companies can enroll readers in a book of the month, movie of the week or video game club and earn affiliate fees from purchased product. It's closely related to this next component...

Fifth, we’ll extend the existing NewsCloud resource directory to provide a store catalog and affiliate management system. This allows media companies to easily earn affiliate fees for products they wish to refer readers to. NewsCloud already includes API level integration with Amazon’s Product API.

Finally, we’ll also work on solutions for integrating our open source platform registration with legacy systems of The Seattle Times website and other media adopters.

How can we do all this in two years? The open source NewsCloud platform provides an outstanding starting point for this project because of its sophisticated Ruby on Rails architecture and numerous ready to use features such as: registration, profiling, Facebook Connect and Twitter integration for registration and viral sharing, background scheduling, notifications and email delivery, Compass and SASS integration for managing design resources, internationalization support (i18n), widgets, resource directory which can be extended into some of our key target features such as deals and the store and an Amazon AWS machine image for affordable, robust hosting.

Stay Tuned

If we’re successful, we will have created an entirely new suite of approaches to revenue generation for news organizations, approaches that offer higher margins than display advertising and the added benefit of happier, more loyal readers. More importantly, our solution will be freely available via open source for any news organization to adopt and use.

We’ll be providing further updates to the foundation later next week, which we will also publish to our blog. Follow @newscloud on Twitter for updates. 

Have a question? Post it here in the comments or email jeff at newscloud dot com. 

No Joy in Rockville Central Move to Facebook Page

Update: NewsCloud's latest free, open source release can be installed easily on a $45/mo. server. See NewsCloud's feature list. Read about our latest grant.

Having worked on our open source community Facebook platform for media organizations for the past five years, I found Rockville Central's post about migrating exclusively to a Facebook page fascinating but disappointing.

I don't fault the Rockville folks, they feel that their Facebook Page makes the most sense for them at this time - and they do a good job of explaining it. But, as they acknowledge, this may not be suitable for other organizations.

I was most struck by comments later in their post: "We have no desire to generate revenue". Not too many community building efforts can sustain themselves without some revenue. Volunteer community organizers generally burn out over time. They also acknowledge that competition, notably AOL Patch's new Rockville site, contributed to their decision to abandon their website.

We've long felt that Facebook pages are a poor substitute for hosting engaged and informed communities. Not only are Facebook Pages proprietary, unattractive, inflexible, unsearchable landing pages for browsing but they don't provide hosts the ability to provide unique interactive features. For example, NewsCloud's platform offers 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.

Yet, we understand that tools like ours are still a bit too expensive and complex for small media sites like Rockville Central. 

Beginning in May, NewsCloud will be almost exclusively focusing on making our Knight Foundation-funded open source community social media platform more accessible and affordable to small community media organizations. In the meantime, we've written a guide for community foundations on how to work with grantees to launch sites on our platform.

We see Rockville Central's decision as an indicator that platform providers like us have more work to do to become a viable solution for smaller communities. Stay tuned in the coming months (follow us @newscloud) to keep apprised of upcoming announcements about our efforts in this area.

I'll make it a personal goal of mine to see if we can get the Rockville Central folks to launch a NewsCloud-based site by early 2012.

 

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.

Sneak Preview of NewsCloud 2011 - 2012 Roadmap: Simplicity & Affordability

Update: Here's our grant announcement NewsCloud to make Facebook-connected communities easy.

I wanted to give folks a quick preview of our planned roadmap for NewsCloud's open source Facebook community platform. Primarily, we'll focus on making running the NewsCloud platform simpler and more affordable to make it more accessible to a variety of news organizations, community groups and individuals.

There are two key areas of focus, initially:

1) Making the open source code base easier to install, set up and manage.

2) Making the open source code base installable on hosting environments that are more economical such as the Amazon AWS MicroInstance which is free for one year.

We're currently finishing up some design improvements to the current platform and expect to have a third stable release available in April. We expect the initial simplicity and affordability initiative improvements to start rolling out in June and July, 2011.

Ruby on Rails developers can install our current stable or daily code from Github today. Share your thoughts and questions. 

We'll provide more information in the coming months. Follow us @newscloud to keep up with the latest updates.

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?

 

Classifieds and Lending Library Feature in Beta Testing

You can try our new Classifieds and Lending Library feature now in beta testing at The Needle, our Seattle prototype site. We've added these features to enhance the NewsCloud platform for attracting readers to our news communities.

The Lending Library allows people to share physical goods with their neighbors, friends or any Needle reader (i.e. you can share items with everyone or choose to share only with your Facebook friends). Adding books, DVDs and other items is quite easy with our Amazon product lookup - just type in a keyword or ISBN/ASIN # to quickly add the item. You can also post items to sell or offer them for free.

The Lending Library is a feature that NewsCloud had provided in an earlier Facebook application that is now moved over to our open source platform. 

We'd also encourage you to watch Rachel Botsman's Ted Talk on the emerging collaborative consumption model on sharing and swapping physical goods.

We think we've designed a Classifieds system with Facebook integration that beats CraigsList (which doesn't allow for lending physical goods). Please give us your feedback.

The NewsCloud open source platform is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

New Predictions Game on View at The Needle

We've added a new Predictions game to the open source NewsCloud platform. You can see a demonstration of this at The Needle, our Seattle demonstration site.

Basically, we've created topics and questions related to future news events and so that readers can guess at what will happen.

For example, at The Needle today, you can guess whether Barack Obama will win re-election, whether our "big dig" tunnel project will go over budget, in what year the Puget Sound Orca will go extinct and in what year Microsoft stock will hit $40 per share? 

When these events occur, we'll score the predictors and a high scores page will show the most accurate forecasters.

We think this is a great way to engage people in the news in fun, playful and competitive way. We're looking forward to seeing more of our partners add this feature to their sites.

Please check it out, we welcome your feedback.