The NewsCloud Blog

Introducing NewsCloud Community Scoring and Member Levels

From the beginning, a primary goal of building the NewsCloud community has been to empower it with influence over the way the site itself operates. Today, I'm introducing an experimental scoring system which rewards more active NewsCloud users with more influence in our community.

Initially, I've programmed NewsCloud to rank members based on their levels of participation as well as performance as judged by other members (through responses to posted stories and comments). From these rankings, NewsCloud assigns each member a user level e.g. Platinum (high), Gold, Silver, Bronze, Contributor and Reader (beginner). The higher your user level, the more voting power you have to determine which stories appear on the front page at NewsCloud. Rankings will be re-calculated regularly. If your participation increases, expect to see your user level grow over time. By visiting your account page, you can see a complete breakdown of the factors we're measuring and how you rank against the overall community.

The ranking system not only rewards you for voting and posting stories and comments but it also rewards you when stories you post generate discussions or when other readers rate your comments highly. The rankings also reward you for inviting new members to our community - especially so when they join. It also assesses your involvement over the past 30 days as well as the past six months.

I will continue to experiment and tweak the measurement system over time to produce better and better results. If you have questions or feedback, please email me at jeff@newscloud.com. Please also let me know if you encounter any problems with the new rankings or experience problems voting.

Thank you for your continued support!

You can view your account score here. Here is an example breakdown below:

Technorati Tags: member levels, user scoring, ranking

Browse incoming stories from around the Web

NewsCloud has a new Incoming Stories page which allows you to browse feeds from around the Web. On the new page, you can browse stories that readers have posted to NewsCloud or wire feeds from our partner sites, other mainstream media and even reader blogs! You can also visit your account page and add your own blog to share with NewsCloud readers. If you don't have a blog, you can get a free WordPress blog at NewsCloud.

Technorati Tags: rss, newswires, incoming stories, free blog, wordpress

NewsCloud Now Offers Comment Rating

Now you can rate the comments of other NewsCloud readers. You can also sort a comment thread by date or ratings. Link to example

Technorati Tags: comment ratings

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!

Talk About This feature added

We've introduced a new feature at NewsCloud called Talk About This which emails readers when there's an important story to discuss (no more than every 2-3 days). If you wish to turn off this feature, you can opt out at anytime by changing your subscription settings in your profile. Talk about this will help stimulate discussions on hot topics and breaking stories within our community.

The first two stories were: Studies: CO2 output must cease altogether and Tibetan monks 'surrounded' by Chinese troops ... join the discussions there...

Technorati Tags: comments, talk about this, email alerts

Rich text editing for comments and story captions

We're experimenting with adding the open source FredCK editor to NewsCloud comments and story posting. The editor makes it easier to edit and format rich text comments and and captions. Please give it a try and let us know what you think. You can see it here and here.

If you run into any bugs or problems with it, please email me.

Technorati Tags: fckeditor, rich text formatting, comments

Drupal Newsroom Module Beta Release

Today, I'm excited to announce the Drupal Newsroom Module beta powered by NewsCloud. The Drupal Newsroom provides an excellent way to add dynamic current events and news to your Drupal-powered Web site. It's also a great way to stimulate involvement and discussion in your online member community.

The Drupal Newsroom module provides a page for your Drupal-powered Web site with news stories based on specific topic(s) from NewsCloud.com or populated by your staff or site members. The newsroom module allows your members to browse headlines, read stories, vote, comment and post new articles.

The Drupal Newsroom allows organizations on different Web sites to collaborate, selecting stories for a topic-based newsroom, sharing the content and discussions from their site with other like-minded groups.

Features

• Share news stories within your Drupal-based Web site community
• Automatically feed stories into your Web site from NewsCloud.com based on a topic or seed them yourself
• Allow your members or staff to post their own stories
• Allow your members to participate in the story presentation process by voting on their favorites
• Allow your members to comment on stories and engage in discussions
• Allows your organization to pre-approve all public stories (optional)
• Republishes your news stories to the NewsCloud.com community (and optionally comments) for additional outreach
• Provides an RSS feed of your newsroom available for your site members

Visit the Drupal Newsroom Demonstration page to see it in action. You can log in with the credentials user name: user and password: user to post stories, votes and comments.

Learn more or download the beta at the NewsCloud Wiki.

This is also the first major cross-platform application of the NewsCloud Web Services API.

Please send feature requests and bug reports to jeff@newscloud.com. This module was developed by Dave Tarc. Thanks to Alex and Rob at Social Signal for helping in the specification of the module features and Jodie Tonita for making the introduction.

Technorati Tags: drupal, drupal module, drupal plugin, newscloud, newscloud api, newsroom

November is Feature Request Month at NewsCloud

If you have a favorite feature idea or feature request, post it to the comments here and we'll try to prioritize adding the most popular and interesting by the end of the month. Thanks for your continued support!

If you want to share your idea privately, you can email it to me.

Technorati Tags: feature requests, november, wish lists

NewsCloud Now Supports Sign In via Your Facebook Account

If you are a regular Facebook user, you can now sign in or sign up at NewsCloud just by clicking the Facebook icon on our NewsCloud Sign In page. If you are already logged in to Facebook, you'll be automatically logged in to your NewsCloud account without having to type a password. If not, Facebook will ask you to sign in, then you'll be redirected back to NewsCloud all signed in.- again no password.

If you have a Facebook account but haven't signed up at NewsCloud, just click the Facebook icon and you can sign in or register at NewsCloud without having to provide a new password.

You can try it from here too:

We've also recently added support for sign in and registration via OpenID.

Technorati Tags: facebook, newscloud, openid

NewsCloud Now Supports OpenID

We've added support for OpenID, an emerging authentication system for users to log in without passwords. Essentially, you get an OpenID at one site and create a password at that site to authenticate yourself. Then, as you visit other OpenID-enabled sites, you just provide an address of your profile page from that Web site to login or register at other sites. There's no need to remember more than one password. We think OpenID is great and have been meaning to support it for quite a while.

NewsCloud supports consumer and identity server implementations of OpenID. This means that:

a) You can login or register at NewsCloud with an OpenID from another OpenID Identity Server site such as LiveJournal, Vox or MyOpenID et al. When you create a new account at NewsCloud in this manner, you won't have to create and verify a password.
b) You can use our NewsCloud Journal address e.g. jeff.newscloud.com as an OpenID to sign in at other OpenID-enabled Web sites.

OpenID (Wikipedia)
OpenID Directory of Enabled Sites
OpenID Directory of Identity Servers
Watch an interview with Simon Willison about OpenID

We added OpenID capability to our site with the OpenID Enabled PHP Library and the Automattic MU WordPress OpenID Plugin.

We've also recently added sign on via Facebook. You can sign in to NewsCloud just by clicking the Facebook icon on our Sign In page, as long as you have a Facebook account.

Technorati Tags: facebook, newscloud, openid, wordpress

Try the Comedy Central Video Application on Facebook

I've put together a new Facebook application for browsing, watching and sharing Comedy Central videos from all the shows that they provide RSS feeds for.

Install the Comedy Central Video application for Facebook

Install the NewsCloud application for Facebook

Technorati Tags: comedy central, facebook

Help beta test the NewsCloud Facebook Application

Help us beta test the Facebook application for NewsCloud:

Our Facebook application allows you to keep up with top stories, breaking news, track what your friends are reading as well as watch video from The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Not only can you watch your favorite video clips from Facebook, but you can share them and post them to your friends on Facebook.

The application is in beta testing - but works pretty well. If you need to report a bug, request a feature or high five us, email me.

I want it now: Install the NewsCloud application on my Facebook profile

Technorati Tags: colbert report clips, daily show on facebook, facebook, facebook applications, share daily show clips, the daily show

Baby's got a brand new bag

NewsCloud's got a new cover page. Check it out and please let me know what you think - either email me or post your comment here. We'll be making a few more changes in the coming days ... so stay tuned.

If you have any problem viewing the page, try refreshing your browser two to three times to clear the cache of old code.

Technorati Tags: new cover page, redesign, newscloud

Updated Cover Page Features

I've added some new panels and features to the NewsCloud Cover Page. You can now scroll through elements of most of the panels ... this allows for more information to be shown on the initial page layout. I've also added some new panels with the extra space: Online Now, New Readers, Most Emailed, Most Discussed.

Let me know what you think of the navigation features and if you have any other feature requests.

Email me

Meet David Roberts, this week's Spotlight blogger

We're starting a new feature at NewsCloud, it's a weekly Spotlight blogger who will bring expertise from their community to ours. To kick off our inaugural week, David Roberts of Grist Magazine will be posting a story each weekday for you to read and respond to.

Each day, Dave's Spotlight pick will appear in the upper left corner of our cover page.

Dave's Journal can be read here. His first story today is "Clusterfuck Nation" by Jim Kunstler.

By the 1980s, America had been converted, with monstrous efficiency, into what I have called a geography of nowhere, a panorama of identical highway strips, malls, big box warehouses, fried food out-parcels, and free parking wastelands -- all serving the endless new subdivision pods of single family houses. The ultimate result was a landscape full of places no longer worth caring about.

Read more or post your comments

If you're a Grist fan, you may remember that Dave famously reached the Rush Limbaugh program by suggesting that paid detractors of global warming should one day face a Nuremberg-like climate change trial court. It seems the radical right doesn't like it when progressives do a better job at using language.

If you'd like to suggest someone for the Spotlight feature, please email me. The person should have some kind of expertise but doesn't necessarily have to be a blogger.

Technorati Tags: david roberts, grist, kunstler, newscloud, spotlight

Free Gmail accounts available at NewsCloud.com domain

We're now offering free Gmail accounts with the @newscloud.com domain address to all regular NewsCloud contributors. For our most active participants, you can get a free gmail account at your_member_name@newscloud.com. If you are a regular contributor, please email me and we'll get your account set up.

Technorati Tags: gmail, newscloud, google apps

Permalinks added to NewsCloud stories

We've added some helpful permalinks to the bottom of NewsCloud story pages to help you share stories with your friends:

• permalink - the link to the page you are reading on NewsCloud
• directlink - the link to the story on the original site e.g. the story at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
• blogosphere - the link to the Technorati Cosmos search of the story to see what bloggers are writing about the story

Another link we could add is the permalink to the NewsCloud View Story tab, but I didn't want to put too many there right away. If you are interested, just add ?showStory to the permalink and your friends will be directed to the NewsCloud View Story tab for that story. Let me know if you think I should add this.

Of course, the Email This button is the easiest way to share NewsCloud stories with your friends.

Technorati Tags: permalinks

NewsCloud TypePad Widget for Your Blog

I'm excited to announce the NewsCloud Headlines TypePad Widget which makes it super easy to place headlines from your NewsCloud journal (or another of our popular feeds) onto your TypePad blog. Sharing headlines from your NewsCloud Journal is an excellent way to add breaking news and current events to your blog.

Alternately, you can select from popular feeds e.g. top stories, incoming stories or top sections e.g. technology or health. You can also configure the title of the widget and the number of headlines shown on your blog.

We use the Widget on the NewsCloud blog already - just look to the lower right NewsCloud Headlines area...

Please let us know what you think of the Widget and if there are any improvements that you'd like us to make. Learn more about TypePad Widgets.

Note: If you use advanced templates on your TypePad blog or use another blog service, Widgets aren't supported. In that case, refer to our FAQ Including an NewsCloud RSS Feed in your Existing Blog or Web Site . With WordPress for example, you can use their existing RSS widget and refer to our feeds directory.

Technorati Tags: bloggers, newscloud, wordpress, typepad, typepad widgets, widgets, typepad, typepad widget, widgets

Advertising on NewsCloud

We've begun including advertisements on some pages of NewsCloud to begin raising revenue for our fledgling site. To date, NewsCloud has been self-funded, but to grow we will require a wide variety of other revenue sources. Advertising is one of those sources.

As always, please feel free to post your feedback here on our blog or email us.

Advertisers - if you are interested in buying ads on NewsCloud, please email us.

Technorati Tags: advertising, advertising on newscloud, advertising on newscloud

New section page functionality

I've finally added some new content and functionality to the section pages - this was long overdue. Now when you visit the International, Technology, et al. page, you can see a tag cloud of the most popular related topics. Click on any of the related topics to drill down into a subtopic area. It's kind of a cool way to navigate our story database.

Also, you'll see the top posters and recent comments for any given topic. So, if you're a NewsCloud user with an expertise in Apple iPods, you'll appear at the top of that page.

Enjoy and as always you can email me feedback.

Technorati Tags: NewsCloud sections, related topics, tag clouds

Upload a video bio to your NewsCloud journal

Now you can add a video bio of yourself to your NewsCloud journal so others can learn more about you. You can see my video bio here.

Here's how to upload a video bio to NewsCloud:

1. Film your video bio and upload it to YouTube.

If you have a camera on your computer, you can use YouTube Quick Capture to upload it right now. You can even set up YouTube to upload videos from your mobile phone. Otherwise, you'll need to upload your video from a file you import to your computer.

For now, we only support videos on YouTube. Please email us if you'd like us to support other platforms.

2. Sign in to NewsCloud and visit Your Account page

3. Enter the short video ID code from YouTube

YouTube videos have a link like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQJewsW0l0Y. The video ID code comes after ?v= in the URL. In this case, it's NQJewsW0l0Y. Enter this code into the Video Bio field on the NewsCloud account page and click Update basic profile.

Once your video bio has been approved, your video will appear on your journal page.

Technorati Tags: bio, video bios, youtube, youtube quick capture

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

Upgrades to Your Journal

We've made some really cool upgrades to Your Journal page. You can take a look at mine here.

I'll have more to say about this soon.

Technorati Tags: journals, NewsCloud Journals

Automatically post news summaries to your blog each night

We have a new feature that allows you to automatically post a summary of headlines and abstracts from your Journal into your Wordpress, TypePad, LiveJournal or Blogger blog. Each night, we'll automatically post links to any stories that you posted to your NewsCloud journal the day before.

It looks like this.

Turn on automatic daily posting in your Account page -> Blog Settings at NewsCloud.

This is a new feature, so if you have any suggestions or requests on how we can improve it, please email me.

Technorati Tags: blogging, autoposting, typepad, blogger, wordpress, livejournal

Try our new Browse for Stories page

Please try out our new Browse for Stories page and let us know what you think. Browse for Stories is a feed reader of sorts that let's NewsCloud readers browse popular and personalized RSS feeds of news sites or blogs and select headlines for posting to the NewsCloud community.

Browse for Stories is a great way for bloggers to post stories related to their blog into their NewsCloud Journal.

Just sign in at NewsCloud and click Browse for Stories to try it out.

Please give it a try and email us your feedback.

Technorati Tags: feed reader, blogs, rss, browse for stories

Updated Post a Story Page

We updated our Post a Story page today to make it easier and faster to submit stories. The new Post a Story page has a simpler layout and design to help you compose your content, including photos and extended commentary.

We also adjusted our photo scaling to it pictures should be a bit sharper now.

Enjoy.

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

Save Stories to NewsCloud from Bloglines

If you use the Firefox Web browser, you can now add stories to NewsCloud directly from Bloglines. This makes it a lot easier to add news to your feed.

1. Install the Greasemonkey Firefox extension.
2. Restart Firefox
3. Open up the Bloglines Save to NewsCloud script in the browser
4. From the Firefox menu, select Tools > Install User Script...or you may be able to click the install button if it appears on the page.
5. Visit Bloglines and refresh the page, you should see the Save to NewsCloud link beside each blog entry

You will need to log in to NewsCloud before you start using Bloglines for this script to work. If Bloglines changes their Web code significantly, the script may stop working.

Please send us feedback or let us know if the script stops working.

Technorati Tags: bloglines, firefox, greasemonkey, save to newscloud

Cool Geographic News Visualization

From Brian, What's Up. It visualizes breaking headlines around the world on a map.

Technorati Tags: news, visualizations, mashups, maps