The NewsCloud Blog

Knight News Challenge Winners Announced; MIT Tops List With $5 Million

Editor and Publisher reports the MIT Media Lab received a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation "to create a Center for Future Civic Media to develop, test, and study new forms of high-tech community news." Other winners included $700k to MTV for mobile youth journalists to cover the 2008 election. ChicagoCrime received $1.1M "to create a series of city-specific Web sites devoted to public records and hyper-local information" and VillageSoup received $885K "to build free software to allow others to replicate the citizen journalism and community participation." E & P also reports "Eleven other grants of between $25,000 and $340,000 were awarded...[and]...nine bloggers will each get $15,000 to blog about topics ranging from GPS tracking devices to 'out-of-the-box' community publishing solutions." Congrats to all the winners!

For the rest of us, there's always next year. Entries start up for 2007 July 1st, but are more narrowly focused than last year:

Anybody, anywhere in the world is eligible for funding — if the project meets all of the following criteria:

1. Use digital media.
2. Involve new forms of news in the public interest.
3. Focus on specific geographic community.

NewsCloud entered its open source platform in 2006. Although we were asked to submit a secondary application, we were not selected as a winner.

Technorati Tags: knight foundation, news challenge, knight foundation winners

Lifehacker's guide to weblog comments

Via Kathy:

Good blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly and engaged. Build your own online social capital and become a great blog commenter by keeping these simple guidelines in mind before you post.

Stay on topic.

Bloggers enable comments on specific blog posts to hear more about the content of the post. Don't change the subject. There's nothing more annoying than seeing a comment on a post about Hurricane Katrina that reads, "By the way, do you know anything about turtles?"

Contribute new information to the discussion.

Twelve people saying the same exact thing in one comment thread is useless and irritating. Before you comment, read the entire thread and make sure your comment offers something new to the conversation. If you don't have the time or patience to read an entire thread, then don't comment at all. The longer a comment thread the more likely someone has already said what you're thinking, and the less likely it is to be read by future visitors anyway.

Don't comment for the sake of commenting.

Commenters who only say "First!" or "Nice site" on an open thread have no business hitting that "Post" button at all. Further, only spammers comment for the sake of adding their name and URL to a web page. Useless comments will gain you the reputation for being a useless commenter.

Read the rest of Lifehacker's guide to weblog comments

Technorati Tags: comments, guide to weblog comments, lifehacker

The three things I don't like about Newsvine

Newsvine is another local Seattle social news startup. They have six employees and about $1.25 million in funding. They are different than NewsCloud in that they focus a lot on original material whereas NewsCloud is more of an aggregator using citizens as editors.

The three things I don't like about Newsvine are:

1) The big green monster at the top of every page. I find it big, dark and confusing...

2) As they license the Associated Press feed, they seed much of their site with only AP content. Readers can submit from other sources but I find the primary content very mainstream. Check out the NewsCloud Newswire for a more diversified approach.

3) They lock readers into their blogging service. Newsvine authors are essentially bloggers who only blog about newsy material and only on Newsvine. With such great blog tools such as WordPress (free), Blogger (free) and TypePad out there, why lock their members into a proprietary tool. Blogging is meant to be more than just news. I just find the idea of Newsvine's proprietary blogging service very restrictive. Btw, NewsCloud's approach is to allow readers to blog stories to almost any third party service - our approach is open.

Technorati Tags: newsvine, seattle, newscloud, things I don't like

Copy as HTML: A Firefox Add-on Makes Posting Stories and Comments Easier

Now that NewsCloud allows the posting of stories with rich, HTML-formatted captions and comments, you might check out the Firefox Add-on Extended Copy Menu. It allows you to easily select a block of text as HTML instead of plain text.

So, for example, if you wanted to copy a paragraph with links on a Web page to post as a comment or a story caption, you would just select the desired text, right-click your mouse and select Copy as HTML. Then, when you paste it into NewsCloud, the links and formatting would be maintained.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Technorati Tags: firefox add-ons, extended copy menu, copy as HTML

Bling for Your Blog

The New York Times has a story about blog widgets today.

You can get NewsCloud's TypePad Widget or learn about other ways to put our content on your site here.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, typepad widget

This is what citizen journalism looks like

In Gates Foundation Not Reviewing Investments After All, Seattlest was kind enough to acknowledge that Idealog, the blog of NewsCloud's founder, broke this story early (both to Idealog and NewsCloud):

Last Wednesday the Seattle Times reported the story of the Foundation's pledge to review their investments. However, that fantasy world was quickly revealed to be a sham. The Idealog blog smelled the Foundation's backtrack way before it was reported in the in an editorial in the L.A. Times over the weekend in which the Gates Foundation CEO basically says, "Screw you, we aren't changing shit. C'mon, little people, do you really think we don't know what we're doing here? $66 billion isn't some boutique fund that can afford to care about anything other than sustaining itself. Sure, we're in it for 'doing good' with our gigantic pile of money - The problem is that there is no greater good than a gigantic pile of money."

Well said Dan.

Geov Parrish also gave us credit at HorsesAss today (Geov is an advisor at NewsCloud):

And, it turns out, there was another problem: talk is cheap, and, it quietly emerged, fully retractable. Two days after that, on Friday, the web site NewsCloud.com broke a story bluntly headlined “Gates Foundation Revokes Pledge to Review Portfolio.” Our beneficent local philanthropists got their message out, and then changed it.

It's great seeing other blogs highlight the citizen journalists breaking news (and great when it's us).

Mainstream media outlets are reticent to source blogs, but I think this is slowly changing.

Technorati Tags: gates foundation, horsesass, seattlest

NewsCloud Added to the TypePad Widget Gallery

Our NewsCloud Widget is now part of the TypePad Widget Gallery. If you have a TypePad blog, you can use the NewsCloud Headlines widget to add your journal content to your blog.

Technorati Tags: typepad, typepad widgets, blogging

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

Top Blog Services

Update: NewsCloud now provides WordPress blog services free with every account sign up. Sign up for NewsCloud here and then you can use your blog at http://yourname.newscloud.com. See mine for an example.

If you want to host your NewsCloud blog at your own domain, send me an email.

If you are looking for another service to start a blog, try one of these:

TypePad

WordPress
LiveJournal 

Blogger

Vox 

Technorati Tags: blog services

How to integrate your blog with NewsCloud

Last week, SheMuses set up a new Wordpress blog and integrated her NewsCloud journal in just a few minutes. It's a good example of how other bloggers can easily integrate breaking news with their blog.

In Wordpress, there is a widget for RSS feeds - so it took Jodie just a few minutes to drag the RSS widget to her template and link it up with her RSS address of her NewsCloud journal.

Technorati Tags: wordpress

Integrating News with Your Blog

As bloggers, we may only have time to write deeply about one or two topics a day but want to offer our readers a way to keep up with news related to the topics we write about.

NewsCloud's Guide for Bloggers will help you focus on your blog while making it easy to bookmark news stories and integrate them into your blog. While the guide shows you how to use our online feed aggregator to track stories, bookmark them and add them to your blog, it also shows you how to design your NewsCloud Journal to reach a wider audience for your blog.

Anytime a NewsCloud reader sees a story you posted, they'll see a short bio about you that can link to your blog. Anytime they visit your NewsCloud journal, they'll see headlines from your blog.

NewsCloud can even automatically post summaries of your news bookmarks to your blog on a nightly basis.

With our new Template manager, you can synchronize the design of your blog as I've done: Idealog is my personal blog which lists headlines from my NewsCloud Journal where I collect news stories. Anyone with a knowledge of HTML can customize your journal for you. Our Guide to Templates will explain how to do this.

While this is a short post, the capabilities that we're talking about are substantial. As the NewsCloud media platform evolves, there are many new ways for individuals and groups to take advantage of our technology. We look forward to hearing from you. Please email us any feedback that you have.

Thanks again for your support.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogging tutorial, news, newscloud, templates

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