The NewsCloud Blog

WordPress Plugin for SurfShare

We've added a WordPress plugin for bloggers who want to try out our SurfShare micropayment platform. If you are interested, visit the SurfShare WordPress Plugin Page for more information and download.

Surfshare adds tipping and payment options

Update: Get the new plugin for your WordPress blog

We've added payment options to our experimental Surfshare service for bloggers and news sites. 

Tipping: If you visit a page you really enjoy, you can tip the blogger a small amount e.g. 25 cents to $5.00. Your tips will be aggregated on a regular billing statement. In fact, if you like this post, click the Leave a tip link in the right sidebar below Your Site Activity.

Larger contributions and Surfshare micropayments:

If you visit a Surfshare-enabled site regularly enough, you'll occasionally be reminded to support the site. View the popup shown below. Or, you can trigger the popup by visiting a number of pages on this site - or just click this link, or here or here.

There are essentially three options:

1) You can authorize the site to be included in your Surfshare bill. Currently, one cent will be added to your bill for each story you read (unique stories, not visits). 

2) You can choose to make a larger contribution to the site e.g. $5 - $100. 

Both of these kinds of payments will be aggregated in the same monthly statement mentioned above.

3) You can choose to keep reading for free ... and we'll remind me you again at a later date.

Our goal is to give the user as much control over the process as possible. Users can cancel tips, donations and micropayments any time before paying their first bill. We hope to add more account and privacy options soon.

You can add Surfshare to your blog or news site here. There is no cost to use the service. Learn more about SurfShare from here.

Disclaimers: Surfshare is an experimental service, still in alpha. We do not intend to collect any revenue from this service until 2010. Readers will have a chance to reset their balances up until we commence billing.

Google Quietly Closes AdSense API to Small Publishers

Google has raised the required minimum traffic limit for publishers who wish to use its AdSense API to 100,000 page views per day. The AdSense API was introduced in March as a way for sites with user generated content to share advertising revenue with their members. Says Google, "This policy change will probably result in fewer developers going live and give us a chance to enhance our support resources and processes to more easily support a greater number of developers in the future...we hope to be able to lower it in the future as we become more efficient at supporting our developers!" Meanwhile, some publishers report waiting a month for their API usage to be approved. I take Google at its word for now but worry that small developers could be increasingly squeezed out of the mashup space if this were to become a trend.

Technorati Tags: adsense, adsense api, facebook, google

Social Signal Offers to Support NewsCloud Outreach

Social Signal announced today its offer to work with NewsCloud expanding our outreach efforts with NGOs:

That's why we've decided to extend the same offer of pro bono support to one of the projects that isn't in the room today. Next month, we'll start working with Newscloud, an open source media platform that combines news sharing and social networking. ...

Using Newscloud, an organization's members and supporters can identify the news stories that matter to them, annotate those stories with their own reflections, and collaboratively create a window on the day's issues that reflect their interests and priorities. Individual users may find Newscloud compelling too -- quite apart from the social benefits of collaboratively surfacing interesting stories, it's got a great interface for reading blogs and news sites that displays stories as they appear on the originating site, rather than as plain or reformatted text. The best way to understand Newscloud's value is to visit the Newscloud site, sign up for an account (it's very quick!) and take it for a spin yourself. ...

We're going to work with Jeff to make it easier for non-profits to integrate Newscloud's features directly into their own web sites. Working from our own experience developing non-profit sites on the Drupal platform, we're going to help Jeff develop a Newscloud Drupal module, so that the thousands of community sites now running Drupal can integrate Newscloud-enabled news sharing directly into their sites.

I'm very appreciative of Alexandra's generous offer to work with us on this effort.

if you're a developer and want to learn more about NewsCloud, check out the NewsCloud Wiki or our NewsCloud Web Services API documentation.

Technorati Tags: drupal, newscloud, social signal

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

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