for NewsCloud
The Knight Foundation is sponsoring an ongoing funding effort to support new media expansion for the Drupal platform. It's called the Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI).
I've submitted a proposal to complete and expand the beta Drupal Newsroom that we launched in February. Please take a look, add your comments and vote.
Technorati Tags: knight drupal initiative, drupal newsroom
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
I've completely redesigned the NewsCloud application! Now, it's set up to make it easy to browse incoming stories from around the Web and allow one click publishing to share with your Facebook friends. You can also browse stories your friends publish.
The app makes it easy to create a list of favorite news feeds to follow in Facebook without the complexity of a feed reader. If you have RSS feeds you'd like me to add, drop me a note.
The app also offers videos from The Daily Show and Colbert Report (more coming).
Hope you all are having a great summer! Thanks for your support! Please feel free to email me questions and feedback.
Jeff
p.s. Please invite your friends when asked; your invitations are the primary way people learn about NewsCloud!
In case you missed our April Fool's joke earlier this month, Arctic Polar Bear Relocation Begins on Earth Day today. Keep up with real global warming news at NewsCloud.
Technorati Tags: climate change, earth day, global warming, polar bears
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
In a private email to NewsCloud members today, NewsCloud's founder put his support behind efforts to relocate polar bears to Antarctica:
One of the groups I've been supporting since the NewsCloud acquisition is the Polar Bear Conservancy . Yesterday, PBC announced that it plans to move the first of 3,000 polar bears to Antarctica on Earth Day, April 22.
Scientists say polar bears face near-certain extinction by 2020 as global climate change accelerates melting of their habitat in the Northern Arctic (just last week a polar bear was found and shot 250
miles inland in the Yukon )... Antarctica, in contrast, can be a viable home for the bears.
Though experiencing melting of its own, the southernmost continent still has sufficient ice coverage to support the polar bear indefinitely in its traditional climate, and it has abundant food
stocks, including penguins, seals, dolphins, and migratory whales.You can read yesterday's press release and media event with McCain or Grist's coverage. The PBC folks have a tremendously creative and ambitious team. It's been a privilege to be a part of their efforts in some small way.
We're having our first code meetup in Seattle. This is the first in what will hopefully be a monthly series on open source code development and the NewsCloud platform.
At the first session, we'll be talking about LAMP-based open source development tools and the open source Facebook Application Newsroom framework. If you're interested in learning more about Facebook application development, this will be a great introductory session.
I recommend that you have basic PHP/MySQL skills to get the most from this session.
Please RSVP for the location and so we can keep a headcount of how many people to expect.
WHEN: Tuesday, April 22, 6:30 - 8:30 PM
WHERE: Belltown (RSVP for exact location)
QUESTIONS: email us
Technorati Tags: facebook applications, meetups, seattle
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
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.
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!
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
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
Jon of ONE/Northwest live blogged tonight's event: "Online Social Networks: Can They Power Social Change?". I spoke briefly about Facebook, NewsCloud and a new approach to building Web sites as networks not islands.
A video may be available in the near future.
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
Technorati Tags: adsense, adsense api, facebook, google
Last October, NewsCloud broke the story that YouTube purged its videos of Comedy Central content. This story was shortly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters and others. In January 2007, NewsCloud broke the story that the Gates Foundation revoked its pledge to review the responsibility of its investments. This story was later picked up by the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, and Seattle Times. Today, the New York Times picked up the story on Facebook's obscenely named groups such as Fuck Islam, a story NewsCloud reported last week. This is a good track record for an emerging open source journalism platform. These are the kinds of successes we need more of to have an impact on what people read and what the media covers.
Technorati Tags: facebook, media, new york times, newscloud
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.
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.
You may have noticed my absence from NewsCloud the past two weeks. I went to Peru with Equal Exchange coffee to learn more about Fair Trade. I'll have photos and stories to share in the near future. Anyway, thanks to Garrett for moderating the site in my absence.
It was nice to leave the site for two weeks and see that it kept running the entire time without tech support.
Now that I'm back, I'll have a few new things coming to NewsCloud which I hope to share more with you soon.
Josh mentioned NewsCloud's Facebook applications as one of the top 10 applications on Facebook for utility.
Our list today will look at the top 10 apps for utility. These are apps that are in some way useful. This was a pretty broad list, and probably took us the longest to cut down to a top ten. As a result, we were unfortunately forced to leave off a lot of good apps. This is a completely subjective list, so not everyone will agree with our picks and I encourage you to debate them in the comments.
NewsCloud is a social news application for Facebook. The NewsCloud app lets you submit, read, comment, and vote on stories from within your Facebook account. It also supports videos from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. NewsCloud users can form and join "clouds" (groups) that focus on a specific topic of news, and can access Facebook's built in share utility to easily share stories with their friends.
Install the NewsCloud Application at Facebook
Try our other applications:
Install the Comedy Central Videos Application on Facebook
install the Daily Show News Application on Facebook
Technorati Tags: facebook, readwriteweb
We've released a new code drop for NewsCloud's open source media platform. The version is June 2007 v0.70. Visit the NewsCloud Wiki for release notes and set up instructions. This release has all the latest code and is compatible with our Facebook Applications code released earlier.
There are a few minor configuration changes to make set up easier, so please follow the installation instructions on the Wiki. We are working on an automated package installer for July 2007.
NewsCloud SourceForge Project Site
Technorati Tags: code drop, newscloud, open source
Update: I don't know if it had to do with the Slashdot post today or not, but the NewsCloud application was approved and added to the Facebook application directory today (on a Sunday). Please give the application a try. In addition to providing a number of NewsCloud's social news features within Facebook, it allows you to watch video clips from The Daily Show and Colbert Report from within Facebook and share them with your Facebook friends. More newsy video sources will follow hopefully.
Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook applications, newscloud, slashdot
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
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
Hey folks, we've got some new merchandise from CafePress:
...click on any of the images below to enlarge them...
Stickers (rectangular and oval)
Organic cotton two-sided t-shirts
Enjoy and feel free to email me your feedback on these.
Technorati Tags: newscloud, t-shirts, stickers, cafe press, merchandise
Technorati Tags: netsquared, netsquared winners, newscloud
Technorati Tags: business networking advice, newscloud, jeff reifman
Note: I think Digg has added more people since this photo was taken. Also, there have been interns and contractors involved at different times in NewsCloud.
Working alone has both helped NewsCloud but also hurt it in some ways (not enough benefits from collaboration). However, it took some time to experiment with NewsCloud and get the formula right, I think the approach of starting up alone on a tight budget has been right. One person startups are a bit of a dying breed and NewsCloud will probably have to grow soon too.
Technorati Tags: david vs. goliath, digg team, digg team photo, jeff reifman, kevin rose, newscloud, startups, team photos
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
I've nominated NewsCloud for a Netsquared innovation award. The grants will be small but beneficial for networking and expanding awareness for NewsCloud. I'll use any award to make our open source platform easier to install and extend so that more organizations can benefit from the site's capabilities.
Please register at Netsquared and review the project list. You must vote for five (minimum) to ten (maximum) projects. As NewsCloud is completely self-funded, I'd appreciate if you consider voting for NewsCloud as one of your picks. You must complete your ballot by Saturday, April 14th at 12 noon PDT.
2. Review the project proposals online or download them in PDF form
3. Cast your ballot for your favorite five to ten projects. You must choose at least five or your ballot will not be counted. Voting twice for the same project will disqualify your ballot.
Here are Netsquared recommended voting guidelines:
We seek to present featured projects that can demonstrate the following attributes (though we understand that different projects will have different emphases and strengths). We ask you to keep these criteria in mind to choose projects that:
Here is NewsCloud's project proposal:
NewsCloud is an open source platform that reduces barriers for community groups integrating news-based social networks into their existing Web sites. NewsCloud seeks funds to make its platform as easy to install and extend as Wikimedia, Drupal, et al
Two other projects that caught my eye are my colleague's Aspiration's Social Source Commons (Aspiration funded my earlier project ActionStudio) and The Martus Project - Secure Information Project for global human rights workers. Please check them out.
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I realize it's a bit time consuming, but hopefully you'll find out about some interesting projects that you didn't know about.
Technorati Tags: netsquared, newscloud
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
If you're looking for one of NewsCloud's remote offices, you can find us on Google's MyMaps.
Technorati Tags: remote offices, mymaps, google , newscloud
If you haven't yet, please read and post feedback to our NetSquared Project Nomination:
Expanding access to the NewsCloud Open Source Media Platform
Technorati Tags: netsquared, newscloud, open source platforms
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
Back in August, I complained about how badly Internet Explorer supports (or doesn't support) basic CSS standards ... and that they hadn't seem to do much to improve the situation in the upcoming Internet Explorer 7.0. See Just what has Microsoft been doing for IE 7? (Slashdot). I hoped this would spur Microsoft to improve the CSS compatibility of IE 7.0, which it didn't (despite the netstorm it created).
Anyway, year to date at NewsCloud, 56.64% of visitors still use Internet Explorer. 64.35% of those folks are using Internet Explorer 6.0. In other words, nearly 37% of NewsCloud site visitors have a terrible experience on our site because of IE 6.0, still more have bad (not as bad) experiences with IE 7.0.
Because I'm limited for resources at NewsCloud, I never made IE support a priority but have decided that this, belatedly, must change. Too many people are still on IE 6 and IE 7 hasn't fixed much nor caused people to upgrade. Microsoft, you win...at least until Firefox can make further inroads.
So, we've hired a contractor to improve the functionality and appearance of our site in IE 6 and IE 7. Please take a look and let us know how it goes for you. If you find a bug, please report it here in the comments or email me. About half of the improvements are live, some are still on their way.
There's no way to know how much Microsoft costs the Web developer community in productivity with its failure to support CSS standards (which it claims to support) but I would suspect it's in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Technorati Tags: css compatibility, css standards, ie6, ie7, internet explorer 6, internet explorer 7, microsoft
Crosscut, a news aggregator for the Pacific Northwest region, launches April 2nd. It's technology is partly inspired by NewsCloud.
Disclaimer, the founder of NewsCloud is a minority investor in Crosscut.
We've nominated NewsCloud to be one of the twenty featured Netsquared innovators projects: Expanding Access to the NewsCloud Open Source Media Platform.
The NetSquared Conference (N2Y2) will center on 20 social change projects, and aim to bring together funders, developers, NTAPs, and other people and organizations that can bring these projects to the next level. We are creating a Technology Innovation Fund to provide direct cash support to projects selected by the NetSquared Community.
You can see a list of the nominated projects here.
If you would like to see additional resources awarded to developing the NewsCloud platform, please register at Netsquared, comment on our nomination and remember to vote for us between April 9th - 14th, 2007.
Technorati Tags: netsquared, newscloud, open source, social networks, cms
So, the Knight Foundation News Challenge results are trickling in ... and although NewsCloud made the finals, we did not receive an award. In the spirit of our open source platform, I'm considering posting a PDF of our application in case people want to look at what we proposed. We had applied in the Leadership category which is specifically for scaling up ideas and prototypes.
NewsCloud is one of the only open source social networks for news so it will be interesting what the Knight folks chose instead. It's possible they thought NewsCloud was overly me-too like Digg and others. However, Digg is not an open source platform that can be used to launch new grassroots media sites. It's also possible that the impact on real world communities was not clear in our proposal. I think that's part of the risk in applying for an idea that must be scaled to have more impact. Still another possibility is that they chose to fund an organization like Drupal or Wikia, two organizations that are working to extend their platforms to support social news sites...both are well-funded safe bets with a track record...the kind of sites that more traditional foundations like to fund. The Knight challenge though seemed to want to fund edgy new stuff. We'll see...
Technorati Tags: Knight Foundation, News Challenge, News Challenge Results, journalism, newscloud
NewsCloud was featured yesterday in O'Reilly's MakeZine and their newly launched HacksZine. The piece was titled "Do it yourself grassroots media Web sites":
I'm really impressed with the open source collaborative news site platform - NewCloud, worth a quick gander if you're thinking of starting up a site for a particular cause/effort or project. Jeff writes -
"If you're looking to start up your own online media publication but want something more sophisticated than a blog, check out the latest release of the NewsCloud Open Source Media Platform. NewsCloud.com is a social network for news, like Digg but open source with a greater emphasis on building grassroots networks for collaborative journalism.
If you don't feel comfortable running your own Linux distribution, you might get your feet wet with a NewsCloud Journal or Group which you can customize with Smarty templates. NewsCloud promises more sophisticated hosting and customization options in the near future.
NewsCloud also offers a guide to bloggers for those that want to integrate more news content on their existing blog or promote their
writing on NewsCloud."
Is HacksZine going to be tops? - not sure but while Lifehacker said three free months of T-Mobile WiFi with Windows Vista could possibly be bypassed, "There's a rumor floating around that you can bypass this requirement, but anecdotal evidence suggests the hack doesn't work." Hackszine posted the workaround. No comments on whether hack sites should be helping people get around promotions ... but if they will get me rebates without having to send in seven copies of receipts and pieces of packaging material, I'm all for it.
Technorati Tags: makezine, hackszine, newscloud, open source
NewsCloud founder Jeff Reifman was on KUOW's The Conversation today speaking about socially responsible investing and the politics of corporate malfeasance in light of the story the LA Times broke on the Gates Foundation's investment strategy.
Technorati Tags: reifman, the conversation, socially responsible investing, gates foundation
Thanks to Boing Boing for posting a pointer to a comparison of Digg and NewsTrust at Mercury News. I'm not a Digg fan, but NewsTrust is intriguing. – stories are rated on ten factors. Will I read it? Not sure. Newscloud is similar and even more interesting than NewsTrust, I think. It's a news-sharing community.
I think the NewsTrust folks have done some great initial work and I look forward to seeing how the service evolves.
Technorati Tags: newscloud, newstrust, world changing
If you're an advertiser who would like to reach the NewsCloud audience, you can place ads via Google Adsense.
If you would like to purchase a block of advertising or have an affiliate program you would like to include in our ad rotation, please email us.
Technorati Tags: advertise on newscloud, adsense, google adsense, advertisers
Want to use NewsCloud without seeing ads? Now you can purchase a subscription to NewsCloud and eliminate the ads. Subscriptions are $25 for six months of ad free usage. Sign up below:
Alternately, you can visit our Spread NewsCloud page and make a one time donation.
Technorati Tags: spread newscloud, ad free, subscriptions
The One Laptop Per Child folks wrote about our slashdot post on Eben Moglen from the other day:
Skipping over the OLPC implementation plan realities for a moment, imagine a world where many students have a Children's Machine XO. A world described by Eben Moglen in his Plone Conference Keynote Address and transcribed by The NewsCloud Blog...
As part of the OLPC-enabled content overload, there would be an amazing opportunity to reshape the public discourse with an unprecedented level of inclusion.
Opportunity because One Laptop Per Child cannot guarantee such openness. As China proves with its successful censorship, yet denial of that very censorship, open technology does not equate to actual openness of expression.
Still, a solid OLPC cultural integration plan could go a long way to enabling such citizen journalism revolution. The ultimate crowd sourced CNN.
Technorati Tags: one laptop per child, moglen, citizen journalism
As Americans, we face a number of critical challenges: our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, threats to national security, rising costs of health care and college, rising federal debt, rising prison population, weak public schools, problems with our election system, decline of the middle class, global warming, energy independence, recovery from Hurricane Katrina, etc. The list goes on... Deep and thoughtful media coverage will be essential to help inform us to address these challenges in creative and constructive ways. Media consolidation, control by private corporations and the profit motive is often a barrier to quality and open, vibrant journalism.
While the blogosphere has dramatically expanded the ability for important stories and diverse views to get traction, it's important for the platforms which promote mainstream news, blogs and citizen-powered journalism to be open to public access. While there are a number of social network journalism platforms that allow a wide variety of original content, none of the latest Web 2.0 generation so far are licensed to the open source community to inspect, re-purpose and improve.
Today, we released code for NewsCloud to the open source community with a GPL license. Now other organizations can repurpose our platform to expand their own efforts or simply to improve the features they want to see in our site.
The NewsCloud platform is written in PHP and MySQL. Visit the NewsCloud site at SourceForge to download the code. Visit our Developer Wiki to get more information. There are a number of ways for developers to get involved with us. We've also set up a Google Groups discussion forum for developers. If you just want to integrate your site with NewsCloud, our pre-existing REST-based PHP class of Web Services API is still available.
One of the coolest things about the NewsCloud platform is its expanding use of Smarty as a template engine to individuals and groups to fully customize the look and feel of their content without having to host their own server.
As always, visit the NewsCloud Blog (or RSS feed) to stay up to date on development updates.
NewsCloud's Top Journalism Beats for 2007
NewsCloud readers are currently voting on the top citizen journalism beats for 2007. Voting concludes December 31st and results will be announced in January.
NewsCloud began in 2004 as CommonBits, a community directory for distributing political videos via BitTorrent. It evolved into CommonTimes, a social network for news and was rebranded as NewsCloud.com in May 2006. NewsCloud is primarily the work of Jeff Reifman, a former Microsoft technologist and free-lance journalist and co-founded by Garrett Moon, a computer science student at Western Washington University.
Technorati Tags: newscloud, citizen journalism, open source, programming, media reform, blogging
Yep, the NewsCloud Media Platform is now open source - and live at SourceForge. If you are a developer that wants to get involved in the project, visit our Wiki for more information.
This is a super exciting milestone for NewsCloud and I'll blog more about it later.
Technorati Tags: newscloud, open source, citizen journalism
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