The NewsCloud Blog

iGoogle Widget for Daily Show Video Clips at NewsCloud

Here's an iGoogle Widget for showing the latest Daily Show Clips at NewsCloud. You can add it to your iGoogle home page.

Technorati Tags: daily show clips, daily show videos, igoogle, widgets, widet

The power and failings of Google's RSS News Feeds

Google News is the Web's dominant comprehensive news source. It has a relatively unknown but extremely powerful feature that lets you create an RSS feed from any search query. Just perform a search on Google News, and then copy the RSS link that the page generates (look down the left column for it).

This is an incredibly powerful way to monitor breaking news on any subject...except that the feeds don't work very well. They seem to report duplicate stories repeatedly. My reader, Bloglines, seems to think they are always new anyway. It makes the feed far less usable. Also, Google News returns duplicate hits across identical sources, usually wire feed stories carried by more than one news site.

Technorati Tags: google news, google news rss

NewsCloud for Organizations

I've written up an initial guide for organizations such as community groups and NGOs who wish to make use of NewsCloud. Basically, there are five levels of integration available:

Level One: Add NewsCloud headlines to your Web site or blog

Level Two: Create a Journal to clip headlines from around the Web for your Web site or blog

Level Three: Create a Group for multiple staff or member stakeholders to track and clip headlines on related topics for your blog or Web site

Level Four: Invite your stakeholders to participate in news gathering for your organization

Level Five: Host your own installation of the NewsCloud software at your own Web site

See Guide for Organizations on our Wiki for the full document.

Technorati Tags: guide for organizations, newscloud for organizations, newscloud for groups

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

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

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

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

Publish your video using BitTorrent

Here is a handy guide to getting started with BitTorrent including a number of helpful applications for citizen journalists to publish their video. You can find links to Democracy Player, Broadcast Machine, Zudeo and other sites and tools.

Technorati Tags: movedigital, zudeo, broadcast machine, bittorrent, publish video, citizen journalism

Download Internet Video with Democracy Player

One of our favorite Internet video applications it the Participatory Culture's free, open-source Democracy Player. We highly recommend it for downloading video, especially BitTorrents. They are doing a great job of opening up the Web for video media.

Technorati Tags: democracy player, bittorrent, internet video