The NewsCloud Blog

NewsCloud Receives Knight Foundation Grant to Launch Facebook Sites for Twelve News Organizations

Through April 2011, twelve news organizations will launch Facebook sites with NewsCloud's open source Facebook application technology, thanks to a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The goal of the grant is threefold:

1. To launch community news sites inside Facebook with twelve media partners showcasing different ways of leveraging the popular social network to reach new audiences.
   
   
2. To improve and expand the features and capabilities of the existing NewsCloud Facebook application.
   
   
3. To broaden participation in the open source development community around the NewsCloud Facebook application.

With these goals in mind, we've launched two new sites to make collaboration easier. We're posting most of our design and development documentation for review and discussion at http://support.newscloud.com. Open source developers can follow our progress and download the code from http://opensource.newscloud.com. 

While the NewsCloud Facebook application was initially developed in the PHP programming environment, this week we're releasing an alpha test version built for developers on the Ruby on Rails framework.

Media organizations interested in learning more about the grant program can also contact NewsCloud privately through the above support website.

Research results on the engagement of young people in news in Facebook from the Knight Foundation's 2008 grant to NewsCloud can be found at http://www.newscloud.com/research.

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.

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!

NewsCloud PHP Ad Rotator for Integrating Google AdSense with Other Affiliate Programs

I've enhanced and separated out the NewsCloud PHP ad rotator for folks who want to experiment with it in their own Web sites and blogs. The new code will appear in the next drop of the NewsCloud code.

Google AdSense is a great program, but what if its ads aren't actually the most financially profitable for my Web sites? What if the ads Google serves up aren't as fresh or interesting as I'd like? What if I want to experiment with mixing ads from the Amazon Affiliate program or NetFlix ads from LinkShare or SpamArrest? What if I want to vary the percentage mix in response to click through reports to increase my returns?

Read more

Technorati Tags: ad rotator, adsense, commission junction, linkshare

NewsCloud Released as Open Source Media Platform

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.

About NewsCloud

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

NewsCloud Media Platform Open Source Site is Live

Yep, the NewsCloud Media Platform is now open source - and live at SourceForge. If you are a developer that wants to get involved in the project, visit our Wiki for more information.

This is a super exciting milestone for NewsCloud and I'll blog more about it later.

Technorati Tags: newscloud, open source, citizen journalism

Announcing the NewsCloud Wiki and Developer Forum

We've launched our NewsCloud Wiki to help NewsCloud users who want to take advantage of our more advanced features as well as developers who want to learn more about our project or its web services. We've also set up a developer discussion forum.

Please check it out and let us know what you think. You can email us here.

Technorati Tags: wiki, newscloud, developer forum

Customizing your NewsCloud Journal and Groups

This past week, we've added a super cool new capability for customizing your NewsCloud journal and groups. Now you can use the Smarty templating language to completely control the look and feel of your NewsCloud journal and groups.

Smarty is a simple html-like templating language for customizing pages. if you have a basic knowledge of CSS and HTML, you can pretty easily extend our default templates to design your own pages. Basically, NewsCloud's loads the contents of your journal or group page into variables that you can then access in your Smarty templates. You don't need to host your own server like with our API examples, you just create your templates and upload them to our site - then visit your journal or group pages to see the results.

We don't have detailed documentation yet on this - but feel free to take a look at our default templates and get started. We don't allow you to upload PHP scripts to your Smarty templates - but if there are any specific functions or data that you'd like access to, please let us know. We'll be posting a lot more examples and information on this soon, but please email me if you have any questions or feedback.

Log in to NewsCloud

Visit your templates page to download defaults or upload your custom templates

Group templates can be seen when you create a group here

Read the Smarty Documentation here

Technorati Tags: customization, groups, journals, smarty, templates

NewsCloud Releases Open Media Web Services and API

Today we're announcing the release of the NewsCloud Web Service and APIs as part of our effort to make NewsCloud into a fully open platform for media distribution. Our goal is to expand the potential for citizen journalism by helping developers embrace and extend our work. The NewsCloud web services will allow other community developers to easily interact and expand the stories and features at NewsCloud.com. We hope the result will be a variety of cool mashups, customized Web sites with media content and a better NewsCloud.

NewsCloud's Web Services consist of more than 50 interfaces (APIs) for interacting with our Web site. Nearly everything you can do as a user on the NewsCloud site can be done via our APIs from your own Web site. If you want to, you can even create your own news site - or design your own front page.

We've tried to make it easy for Web developers to make use of our APIs with a simple PHP class. By using our NewsCloud PHP class with your code, interacting with data from our site becomes as easy as manipulating any PHP array data.

We've also built a number of examples for which we're sharing the source code: The Cloud Report - a custom front page, a mini-text-based version of NewsCloud for PDAs, a customized version of your journal page (clippings from all your news stories), a personal tag cloud, a custom group page featuring Daily Show content, example sign in and registration forms, a keyword-based image roll and more. These are just a start - but the potential is vast. We'll be improving and adding to the samples over time with help from our developer community. We've also integrated AJAX using the Prototype Javascript Framework into our registration and voting example to show developers an easy way to take advantage of the interactive elements we use on NewsCloud. We'll be building more AJAX examples over time.

All of our APIs are available via REST as described in our documentation, so you don't have to use PHP to get in on the fun. If there are developers who would like to build code libraries for other platforms or improved examples, please email us.

For users who just want to use our news headlines without the API, we've provided code examples of using the Magpie RSS parser to grab stories from any of our site RSS feeds.

The NewsCloud PHP class and example code can be downloaded here. Use of the NewsCloud PHP class requires PEAR be installed on your server, however, you could replace PEAR with another library for making HTTP requests at your preference.

How can you get started?

Getting started is easy:

1. Visit our NewsCloud Web Services Overview
2. Browse our documentation
3. Get your API key (registration required)
4. Download our example code and start customizing!

How can I get more involved?
We'd appreciate your help with NewsCloud. First, we encourage you to get involved in the NewsCloud community by posting stories and joining discussions. Learn more.

Then, when you've had time to work with our example code, please share your improvements with us. If you have requests for us to expand our API capabilities, please let us know. You can either join the discussions and post suggestions in our experimental Google Group Web Services community - or just email us.

You can also contribute funds to support our site development - click on the tip jar to the upper left if you'd like to help.

Disclaimers

NewsCloud is small startup with just one full time person, so we're monitoring our API usage tightly and carefully limiting volume on sensitive APIs to prevent abuse. Once you've tried out our Web services, just let us know if you want us to increase your limits for your application. If you have a valid use, we'll do our best to accomodate you. Email us here.

We may also modify the API without notice. However, if you use our PHP class as an abstraction layer, you're less likely to run into compatibility problems. We will post notifications of changes and enhancements to the API and example code here on the blog. You can subscribe to our blog feed here.

Right now, there is no cost to use our APIs but we reserve the right to revisit this issue to accomodate load and bandwidth issues, as well as the long term sustainability of our currently pro-bono organization.

About NewsCloud

NewsCloud was founded in 2005 by Jeff Reifman to create an open community to address the problems with consolidation of corporate media and censorship. Originally named CommonTimes, the site was renamed in 2006 as NewsCloud.com. NewsCloud evolved from CommonBits and CommonTunes - earlier experiments in online media distribution communities.

Jeff's experience with online media began in 1995 with MSN News and then MSNBC.com. Since leaving Microsoft, Jeff is a happy Mac user and has written extensively about his former employer. You can follow Jeff's blog at Idealog.us.

Technorati Tags: ajax, api, code samples, newscloud, newscloud api, web services