As Americans, we face a number of critical challenges: our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, threats to national security, rising costs of health care and college, rising federal debt, rising prison population, weak public schools, problems with our election system, decline of the middle class, global warming, energy independence, recovery from Hurricane Katrina, etc. The list goes on... Deep and thoughtful media coverage will be essential to help inform us to address these challenges in creative and constructive ways. Media consolidation, control by private corporations and the profit motive is often a barrier to quality and open, vibrant journalism.
While the blogosphere has dramatically expanded the ability for important stories and diverse views to get traction, it's important for the platforms which promote mainstream news, blogs and citizen-powered journalism to be open to public access. While there are a number of social network journalism platforms that allow a wide variety of original content, none of the latest Web 2.0 generation so far are licensed to the open source community to inspect, re-purpose and improve.
Today, we released code for NewsCloud to the open source community with a GPL license. Now other organizations can repurpose our platform to expand their own efforts or simply to improve the features they want to see in our site.
The NewsCloud platform is written in PHP and MySQL. Visit the NewsCloud site at SourceForge to download the code. Visit our Developer Wiki to get more information. There are a number of ways for developers to get involved with us. We've also set up a Google Groups discussion forum for developers. If you just want to integrate your site with NewsCloud, our pre-existing REST-based PHP class of Web Services API is still available.
One of the coolest things about the NewsCloud platform is its expanding use of Smarty as a template engine to individuals and groups to fully customize the look and feel of their content without having to host their own server.
As always, visit the NewsCloud Blog (or RSS feed) to stay up to date on development updates.
NewsCloud's Top Journalism Beats for 2007
NewsCloud readers are currently voting on the top citizen journalism beats for 2007. Voting concludes December 31st and results will be announced in January.
NewsCloud began in 2004 as CommonBits, a community directory for distributing political videos via BitTorrent. It evolved into CommonTimes, a social network for news and was rebranded as NewsCloud.com in May 2006. NewsCloud is primarily the work of Jeff Reifman, a former Microsoft technologist and free-lance journalist and co-founded by Garrett Moon, a computer science student at Western Washington University.
Technorati Tags: newscloud, citizen journalism, open source, programming, media reform, blogging
