for 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
We've added some helpful permalinks to the bottom of NewsCloud story pages to help you share stories with your friends:
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
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
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
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:
Technorati Tags: blog services
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
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
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
I've been using Firefox 2.0 and the upgrade has been super smooth. You can download it here:
Technorati Tags: firefox upgrade, firefox2
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.
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
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:
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
We've decided to go back and reopen our comments to visiting readers. So now you don't have to be signed in to post a comment - but you do have to verify your comment via email and register before it appears on the site.
We used to do this with CommonTimes and decided to go back and turn this feature back on.
Please give it a try and let us know what you think. Also be sure to try out our comment formatting and live preview.
Technorati Tags: comments, live preview, newscloud
We're now displaying tags on our section front pages and lists of top stories. We've also properly coded them to link into the Technorati tag searches. Brian will probably be most happy about this.
Let's hope the feed pinging with Technorati is working and it starts to notice our new tags.
Technorati Tags: tags, technorati
We've added JSS feeds for our most popular NewsCloud RSS Feeds.
JSS stands for Javascript Simple Syndication. If you'd like to put NewsCloud headlines on your own blog or Website, just copy the HTML code in the box below to your site. The Javascript code will capture headlines from the selected NewsCloud RSS feed and display it on your own site.
Simply pick the feed you want. Click on the JSS icon. Then, copy the code to your blog or Website.
If you'd like to customize the settings for the display of the headlines, please refer to FeedBurner's BuzzBoost documentation how to apply your own styles or sample uses of BuzzBoost.
Technorati Tags: buzzboost, feedburner, newscloud, rss
If you use FeedBurner to power your blog feed and want people to add your stories to NewsCloud, add the Save to NewsCloud FeedFlare to your feed.
Click the image below to see the example:
Technorati Tags: feedburner, feedflare, newscloud
We've burned a number of new feeds for NewsCloud. You can find an index of our RSS feeds for NewsCloud here.
There are now different feeds for top rated and incoming stories, videos and/or both stories and videos.
I've added live preview and rich text formatting to story comments. Now, when you visit a story like this one, you can add formatting and links to your comments and watch a live preview while you type.
We're using a text formatting system called Textile. If you're not familiar with it, here are some of the formatting options that you can use:
<strong> for bold
<em> for italics
Links can be specified with an anchor tag <a href="http://www.url.com" title="link to this"> or using "linktext":url e.g. "Idealog":http://www.idealog.us
<p> for paragraphs
bq. for a blockquote
<q> for quotes
Technorati Tags: textile, comments, formatting
We've started an experiment to use iFrames to show you story content from other news sites. Please let me know how this works for you and if you like it.
Just click through to any story page and you'll see it in action. I think the only browsers that won't support iFrames are Netscape 4 or IE 3. Also, the New York Times is one site that breaks iFrames so we'll try to link separately to them.
Please let me know how this works for you.
Co-founder and intern Garrett added LiveJournal support to our Blog This feature today. So, have at it and let us know what you think. You can configure your LiveJournal blog account here. NewsCloud also supports TypePad, WordPress and Blogger blogs.
Technorati Tags: blog this, livejournal, newscloud
We've integrated the Plaxo Address Book wizard to make it easier to invite your friends to NewsCloud.
Just visit the NewsCloud Invitation page and click the Add from my Address Book button. That will launch Plaxo's address book wizard which makes it easy to import email address from your mail service or client and invite them to NewsCloud.
Please let us know how it works for you.
None of your personal information is shared with Plaxo unless you request them to contact you at the end of the wizard.
Technorati Tags: invitations, plaxo
Now, whenever you email a story to your friends from NewsCloud, we'll keep track of the people you send to most to make it easier to regularly email them. The next time you email a story on NewsCloud, you'll see a list of easily clickable buttons to quickly email stories to your friends. No more retyping email addresses over and over again.
Soon, we'll add your list of friends to this feature as well.
Technorati Tags: tell a friend, email this, email stories
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
I've changed the Top Editors panel on the cover page so that it shows the performance of editors over the past week. This should allow more new editors to be featured.
Go out there and vote for your favorite stories.
Technorati Tags: top editors, voting
We've just launched an initial Community page. There's a lot more to come here - but check it out and let us know what you think. Now you can see members near you when you provide your zip code - and keep track of news from groups that you join.
You can now override the default RSS feed for you NewsCloud Channel. Usually, your NewsCloud channel RSS feed is:
http://www.newscloud.com/rss/channel/<your_member_name>/
But now, if you login and visit your channel page e.g. http://www.newscloud.com/channel/<your_member_name>/, you can click Change Settings and place a custom URL for your RSS feed.
So, for example, if you use a service such as Feedburner to republish your NewsCloud feed, place the URL for the new RSS feed here: e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/newscloudJeff.
NewsCloud will now publish the new RSS address in the autodiscovery link of your NewsCloud channel feed. The autodiscovery link is used by browsers for detecting RSS feeds - as well as Web crawlers for indexing.
If you'd like also to set up a headline badge for your NewsCloud channel, read this post.
Technorati Tags: feedburner, headline animator, autodiscovery link, rss, newscloud channel
If you would like to set up an animated headline badge of your NewsCloud feed to display on your blog or personal Web site (or even email signature), you can follow the steps below as one possible set of options. Here is an example badge for my NewsCloud feed:
Sign up for a Feedburner Account
FeedBurner is a feed management provider that can help you optimize your NewsCloud feed, publicize it on your blog or Web site, analyze traffic to your feed and even make money from your feed.
If you have a FeedBurner account, you can now connect your NewsCloud feed to FeedBurner, so that your subscribers will automatically pull the feed from FeedBurner without having to switch URLs. Don't have a FeedBurner account? Get one now.
Next, add your NewsCloud Channel Feed to your Feedburner account. Your RSS feed URL is
http://www.newscloud.com/rss/channel/<your_member_name>/
Then, select the new feed in your Feedburner account and click Publicize. Select the Headline Animator option. Take the HTML code Feedburner gives you for the Headline Animator, and place it in your blog, Web site or email signature.
The code will look something like this:
<a href="http://www.newscloud.com/channel/jeff"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/newscloudJeff.gif" style="border:0" alt="My NewsCloud Feed"/></a>
Feedburner has two styles of Headline Animator that you can choose from.
Classic Headline Animator
Email Signature Animator
They also have technical help for placing the Animator code into your email program's signature settings.
More information on the Feedburner Headline Animator.
You might also want to read this post on setting the autodiscovery link for your NewsCloud channel.
Technorati Tags: feedburner, headline animator, newscloud feed
It took the longest time - but we finally have added the ability to edit and delete items in your feed! Just log in and visit your channel - or your account page -> feed section. Just click on edit story or remove from feed.
The changes you make to headlines and descriptions will appear in your feed. If you are the original editor for the story, they will also appear on the cover pages and story page.
Technorati Tags: channel, feed, new features
Our intern Garrett has finished adding support for blogging stories for Blogger, TypePad and WordPress. Great work Garrett!
Just sign in at CommonTimes, then visit the account page for blog settings to configure your authoring settings. Click on any story at CommonTimes and then click Blog this to post about it to your blog.
Blogging from CommonTimes is an easy way to blog about the news. We construct the HTML link to the story for you, so you can literally just add your comments and post away.
Technorati Tags: blogging, typepad, wordpress, blogger, commontimes, blogging-news
You can now set up local news at CommonTimes to follow stories in your home community as well as additional cities you want to follow. Just visit the home page and look for the local section.
Technorati Tags: local-news, media
CommonTimes has a new front page and updated navigation. The new page is designed to provide an experience more like a traditional news site while still providing the great community content of a Web 2.0 site. The navigation now includes tabs for the front page (Home), browsing for stories and submitting new stories.
It's a work progress. Please let us know what you think. Email us here.
We've been changing our design around to reflect some new directions; and we're adding some new features. Among these, we've added a Blogs tab.
This will give you a preliminary look at the feature, but there's a lot more we'll be doing shortly. So, give us a few days or a week and you'll see a lot more here.
Technorati Tags: blogs
We've improved the invitation feature in CommonTimes to make it easy for you to recruit your friends and get them involved. Just click Invite from the home page and paste a list of email addresses (up to 99) into the To: box.
Your friends will receive a special link that registers them in the site, builds them a channel page and adds you to their Friends page and vice versa.
Please give it a try and let us know how it works.
Technorati Tags: invitations
We've enhanced our Groups directory page and made it easier to join groups. While tags allow readers to follow specific topics over time and require manual tags to be applied to stories, Groups are automatically collated by our system.
Join a group and the stories you bookmark are automatically added to the fray. The idea is that when groups of readers with similar interests start bookmarking the news they find important into CommonTimes, the collection of stories by these readers becomes pretty interesting.
As you join a number of groups, your channel page has an option to view a combined groups channel as well - i.e. show me all the news that my groups have been reading.
Although our usage in the Groups area hasn't ramped up yet, you can check out the following links:
Example Group Page: Northwest Environmentalists
As always, let us know what you think with comments posted here or email.
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