NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

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.

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. 

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.

NewsCloud Release 2 is Now Available

Yeah us! And thanks to the generosity of the Knight Foundation who supports our open source work! Our second major open source release of the NewsCloud Facebook platform is now available.

This is the same code powering the Boston Globe's Facebook application. You can read a summary of features here. 

Knight News Challenge Entry: A Crowdsourced Budget Transparency Platform Trial for Seattle and Washington State

Update: This news challenge entry was declined in the first round. No additional details are provided on first round declines. 

We've submitted an open entry to the Knight Foundation News Challenge for 2010 - 2011. We hope you'll take a look, rate and review the application: Crowdsourced Budget Transparency Platform Trial for Seattle and Washington State

Here's the basic project description:

 

Society has great angst about excessive spending and waste in government. Yet, it’s often difficult for individuals to thoroughly identify and highlight examples of this. Similarly, it’s also hard to disprove claims of inefficiency. All of this undermines faith in our local governments and builds resistance to reasonable tax policy.

Our project will build web sites that allow citizens to use social media to assess city and state budgets, show affinity for programs they care about, highlight wasteful spending, identify fraud and create more transparency and citizen involvement in general. We’re essentially providing a platform for crowdsourced analysis of city and state budgets.

We will launch two different sites: one to analyze the budget in the city of Seattle and the other for the state of Washington. We will use a variety of methods for importing public data about government budgets and spending into these sites to make the data easily available for public review.

Any citizen will be able to visit the sites to explore the budget and highlight and share spending items with their friends and colleagues. For example, users will be able to like, dislike, comment, share on Facebook, tweet, tag or flag any budget item. Users will receive email notifications when other people respond to their comments.

On the home page of these sites, we’ll use familiar social media widgets to help people navigate to interesting areas. For example, we’ll list the most liked, most disliked, most discussed and most flagged budget items. We’ll also offer keyword search to make it easier to find specific budget areas.

While these sites will be most deeply utilized by passionate citizens, bloggers and activists, the social media features make it likely for controversial budget items to receive tremendous exposure and discussion within a community.

As part of this project, we will manage a promotional campaign to raise awareness about our sites while leveraging as much as free publicity as possible. We’ll also work with the city of Seattle, the state of Washington and local media and bloggers to encourage them to promote the project from their own websites.

We’ll build the technology for this project by extending the open source Ruby on Rails based NewsCloud platform. Many of the social media features such as Facebook Connect, likes and dislikes, comments, tweeting, notifications, tags, flags and feed parsing are already built into the NewsCloud platform.

Budget data is rarely organized in simple forms. We’ll place significant focus on bringing data into our application in forms that are easily grasped and analyzed by our sites’ visitors. We’ll aim build a flexible hierarchy for organizing data across categories and departments. We’ll also make extra efforts to provide extended analysis e.g. comparing spending by headcount across departments, comparing spending across departments involved in similar functions or budget areas, assess spending vs. public benefit / the number of people who use a resource or are effected by a budget item.

 

Visit the full application

Open Source Facebook Newsroom CMS Application Beta

Today, we're releasing a beta of our new open source Facebook Newsroom CMS application framework:

The Facebook Newsroom CMS framework is generic Facebook application code which can be quickly and easily installed, configured and customized for any small organization wanting to establish a sophisticated Web presence within the Facebook community. We hope this framework will drastically reduce the barrier to entry for organizations wishing to leverage Facebook. See our demonstration site at Facebook.

While Facebook has Groups and Pages that are easy to set up, they are also quite limited in functionality.  These features are not conducive to community-building, engagement or organizing. Until now, building a Facebook application with broader capabilities required a significant investment of $5  - $15,000 minimum. This framework provides the easiest, most customizable and economical solution for small and/or non profit organizations to run an application on Facebook.

It's essentially a start up kit for small organizations wishing to build a Facebook application without spending thousands of dollars. It's also a great starting point which can later be enhanced and extended with additional features. With just a few hours, a Web developer with basic PHP skills can launch your application. Hosting can even be obtained free for one year at Joyent (waiting list may exist for free accounts).

Since the framework is open source, it can grow over time as the development community contributes new capabilities. You can download the source at SourceForge or learn more at our Wiki.

Available Features

The default framework provides some basic pages (like a basic Web site or Drupal or Plone installation) e.g. Home page, Newsroom, Photos, Wall, Discussion Forum, Invitations page and About page. It also provides basic content management (CMS) features for customizing the site from within a Web-based management user interface which many users are already familiar with. Pages can be turned on or off or content edited in place.

The news features include integration with your organization's own RSS feed (from a blog or Web site) and the NewsCloud Newsroom which provides real time community-driven news content on a variety of topics. The NewsCloud Newsroom can also be fully customized. If you have a Drupal-based Web site, check out the Drupal NewsCloud module.

The CMS supports HTML blocks and iFrames to allow you to integrate advertising e.g. Google AdSense, fundraising e.g. ChipIn, photos e.g. Flickr slideshows and more.

See the generic demonstration site on Facebook for examples.

For updates, please check back at the NewsCloud blog or subscribe to our feed.

Newsroom Wiki Project Page

Download the code from SourceForge

Drupal Newsroom Module and demonstration site

Requirements

Facebook Developer account
Linux hosting with PHP 5.x (4.x with minor changes)/MySQL 4.x

Possible hosting options:

Joyent
JohnCompanies
Amazon S3  (may be a bit expensive for some organizations)

Questions?

Set up instructions are included in the readme file with the code download. As usual, please contact me via email at jeff@newscloud.com with any questions, bug reports or feature requests. Thanks all!

Debian Package Installer for NewsCloud Available

There is a Debian Package Installer for the June 2007 release of NewsCloud at SourceForge. Documentation for its use is on the Wiki.

Please give the instructions a try and let us know how this works for you. We wanted to get the installer out into people's hands but we haven't had a lot of resources to test it.

If there are developer folks who would like to see more resources poured into making the NewsCloud platform more robust and easier to install, please donate at SourceForge.

Technorati Tags: debian, newscloud, package installer

Please review NewsCloud's NetSquared Project Nomination

If you haven't yet, please read and post feedback to our NetSquared Project Nomination:

Expanding access to the NewsCloud Open Source Media Platform

Technorati Tags: netsquared, newscloud, open source platforms

NewsCloud for Organizations

I've written up an initial guide for organizations such as community groups and NGOs who wish to make use of NewsCloud. Basically, there are five levels of integration available:

Level One: Add NewsCloud headlines to your Web site or blog

Level Two: Create a Journal to clip headlines from around the Web for your Web site or blog

Level Three: Create a Group for multiple staff or member stakeholders to track and clip headlines on related topics for your blog or Web site

Level Four: Invite your stakeholders to participate in news gathering for your organization

Level Five: Host your own installation of the NewsCloud software at your own Web site

See Guide for Organizations on our Wiki for the full document.

Technorati Tags: guide for organizations, newscloud for organizations, newscloud for groups