The NewsCloud Blog

Review NewsCloud's Knight News Challenge Applications for 2009

This year, Knight's News Challenge applications are open for public review. We're encouraging NewsCloud readers and open source developers to take a look at and rate our applications. This year, we are entering three related projects:

• Social Media Toolkit: an open source solution for social media publishing and website integration
• Open Topics: semi-automated, community-driven topic pages for news
• Get Involved Widgets: A service for online news sites and blogs

If you are interested in entering, the deadline is Saturday, November 1st, 2008.

You can rate and post comments on each proposal at the News Challenge website using the above links.

Integrating ReCaptcha Was Easy

I've added ReCaptcha for NewsCloud registration and the Social Media Toolkit registration (as an option). Integration was quite easy. It seems like a great web service which helps reduce spam and digitizes texts for the future.

2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

I'll be attending Aspiration's 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland Nov 17-19 to talk about NewsCloud's Social Media Toolkit and network with other socially-minded open source developers.

If you are interested in social media or our toolkit, feel free to meet me there!

Are you a developer writing code to support nonprofit needs? Are you a nonprofit user with strong opinions about what software you need developed to empower your programs and operations? Are you someone who just cares about seeing better technology developed to address the broad range of issues we face as a global community?

The 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit will be the second annual convening of people and organizations developing software tools, web applications and other technology to support social justice causes. Bringing together a diverse range of developers, technologists, managers, eRiders, integrators, users and other practitioners who self-identify under the umbrella of roles around “developing nonprofit software”, the 2008 DevSummit will provide an opportunity both to gather as a community and to take stock of the field, while building connections and capacity.

Looks like a great session list.

Hope to see you there!

Try NewsCloud Mobile

Try the beta of NewsCloud Mobile for your cell phone or portable device.

Announcing the Alpha Release of Social Media Toolkit

Updated: See Social Media Toolkit Alpha v0.11 with RSS, Twitter posting, Google Site Maps, ReCaptcha, Mobile support, blog page with SimplePie integration and ad rotation.

I am happy to share an early testing release of the NewsCloud Social Media Toolkit with you. 

Alpha Release of Social Media Toolkit
What is it?
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The Social Media Toolkit (SMT), is an open source platform designed to help organizations run community-driven, topic-based and geo-centric news websites, similar to NewsCloud.com, albeit simpler and more streamlined.  You can see examples of the SMT running here: http://election.newsi.us, http://sarahpalin.newsi.us, http://seattle.newsi.us, http://tech.newsi.us and http://climate.newsi.us.

The alpha release is a preliminary testing release to gather feedback from organizations and open source developers. The initial alpha feature set and design/stylesheets are very basic - but show the potential of the new toolkit. We hope to add more features and improve the default design in the near future.

What can I do with the Social Media Toolkit
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Essentially, you can quickly set up and publish one or more topic-specific news sites with great social media features such as registration, voting, comments, newswires, posting and resource links. Stories are initially seeded from NewsCloud's topic clouds. It's easy to create new topic clouds if you want to. (During the test period, the SMT is restricted to approved clouds.  If you would like to propose a new topic related to your organization or are interested in using the SMT for commercial purposes, please email us.) Organizations with similar missions can also collaborate to moderate specific topics.