The NewsCloud Blog

NewsCloud Open Source Code Meetup in Seattle: Facebook Newsroom Module

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

Open Source Facebook Newsroom CMS Application Beta

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.

Newsroom Wiki Project Page

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!

Drupal Newsroom Module Beta Release

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

• Share news stories within your Drupal-based Web site community
• Automatically feed stories into your Web site from NewsCloud.com based on a topic or seed them yourself
• Allow your members or staff to post their own stories
• Allow your members to participate in the story presentation process by voting on their favorites
• Allow your members to comment on stories and engage in discussions
• Allows your organization to pre-approve all public stories (optional)
• Republishes your news stories to the NewsCloud.com community (and optionally comments) for additional outreach
• Provides an RSS feed of your newsroom available for your site members

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

NewsCloud Open Source Media Platform Releases June 2007 v0.70 Code

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

NewsCloud's Facebook Application Experience

I wrote up some thoughts about having my Facebook account temporarily disabled during the process of trying to invite colleagues to check out the NewsCloud Facebook application. The post is on Slashdot this morning.

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

Open source code drop coming soon

A lot of you have been asking me. I'm working on doing another code drop to SourceForge soon.

I'm no longer going to use the SourceForge CVS tree ... you'll have to download ZIP files to get the latest code. It saves me time only having to do one release drop.

Watch the blog for an announcement of the next code release. In the meantime, be sure to install the NewsCloud Facebook application.

Technorati Tags: open source, code drop, releases

NewsCloud Facebook Application Released via Open Source

Update: Please check out our Open Source Facebook Newsroom CMS Application Framework

I've released the NewsCloud Facebook application to the open source community via GPL. Just install the NewsCloud application on Facebook, and click the download source link in the lower left of the home page.

The code is mostly to help other Facebook application developers. It won't run with the current SourceForge release of the NewsCloud platform, that will be updated in the near future.

If you'd like to participate in the development of the NewsCloud Facebook application or our platform, please email Jeff. 

NewsCloud Source Forge home page

Technorati Tags: facebook, newscloud facebook application, open source

Please review NewsCloud's NetSquared Project Nomination

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

NewsCloud Nominated at Netsquared

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

NewsCloud PHP Ad Rotator for Integrating Google AdSense with Other Affiliate Programs

I've enhanced and separated out the NewsCloud PHP ad rotator for folks who want to experiment with it in their own Web sites and blogs. The new code will appear in the next drop of the NewsCloud code.

Google AdSense is a great program, but what if its ads aren't actually the most financially profitable for my Web sites? What if the ads Google serves up aren't as fresh or interesting as I'd like? What if I want to experiment with mixing ads from the Amazon Affiliate program or NetFlix ads from LinkShare or SpamArrest? What if I want to vary the percentage mix in response to click through reports to increase my returns?

Read more

Technorati Tags: ad rotator, adsense, commission junction, linkshare

NewsCloud Code Release: January 2007b

There is a slightly updated release up at SourceForge NewsCloud Jan2007b and in our CVS tree. This update makes installation a bit easier and has been tested against our Debian installation instructions.

Technorati Tags: debian, newscloud

Debian Installation Instructions for NewsCloud

There are now step by step Debian Installation instructions for NewsCloud which have been tested against a JVDS LinuxStandard1 VPS ($20/mo). Although they should work well on any Debian 3.1 installation.

Technorati Tags: jvds, debian, newscloud, newscloud hosting

NewsCloud Hosting Options

We're now listing hosting options for NewsCloud on our Wiki. Currently, we recommend two: JohnCompanies and JVDS. The JohnCompanies Linux VPS starts at $47 per month. 10% discount on VPS if you say NewsCloud referred you. Deeper discount available for student/nonprofit. 5% discount on dedicated servers. At JVDS, the StandardLinux1 VPS is $20 per month (3 Months = 5% discount, 6 Months = 7.5%, 12 Months = 10% discount). We tested the new Debian Installation instructions against the JVDS account, but it should work well at either place.

Technorati Tags: johncompanies, newscloud hosting, newscloud, jvds, debian

Request for help hosting NewsCloud

I've been getting a number of requests from people asking for help hosting NewsCloud. This is great.

I'm working on a few different tracks to help folks:

1) I and a couple of folks are working on some Linux install instructions to make the process more straightforward (very soon, within the next week)
2) I am talking to some development contractor friends to see if they want to do this work for hire
3) I eventually will look at staffing up NewsCloud to do this, but don't have the resources just yet

I will update this blog when I have more information.

In the meantime, check our Wiki for updates or email me with questions.

I encourage you to post comments to our developer forum as well and perhaps team up with other folks asking the same thing.

Technorati Tags: hosting, hosting newscloud

Second release of NewsCloud open source code for January 2007

We've released the latest code for the NewsCloud platform to SourceForge. Visit our NewsCloud Wiki for download links and setup help.

NewsCloud Release Notes

January 2007 - Second release of code (Jan07)

* General clean up
* Fixed code from first release including missing .htaccess file
* Improved group functionality
* Ad rotator class
* TypePad widget support
* Improved section page functionality
* Support for video bios
* Improved help page

Technorati Tags: newscloud, open source, release notes

Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies

Cory at BoingBoing says:

Rishab Ayer Gosh has led an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers through an enormous study of Free/Open Source Software. The paper, called "Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU," runs to 287 page. It exhaustively documents the way that Free/Open technologies dominate information technology and describes who actually writes Free/Open software. It also talks about what it would cost to replicate the benefits of Free/Open software through proprietary development (EU12 billion!), how many person years that would take (131,000!), and projects the total size of the Free/Open market in the years to come.

PDF Link

Technorati Tags: open source, boingboing, doctorow, ayer gosh

Free Debian Linux Hosting for 501c3 Nonprofits

DreamHost is offering 501c3 nonprofits free Linux hosting accounts. Pretty useful for nonprofit open source projects.

Technorati Tags: dreamhost, 501c3, free linux hosting

Eben Moglen on The One Laptop Per Child and Citizen Journalism

As I mention here, I finally watched Eben Moglen's keynote from the 2006 Plone Conference that my friend Jon has been raving about for weeks. Moglen made some great comments on the potential of the One Laptop Per Child project to affect citizen journalism:

"What is journalism like when every village has a video camera and is on the net? ...

What does it mean if the next time somebody starts some nasty little genocide in some little corner of the Earth the United States government would prefer to ignore, that there's video all over the place all the time in every living room?

What does it mean when children around the world are networking with one another over the issues that concern them directly without intermediation, everybody to everybody?"

Every OLPC is specified with a video camera. Here's a recent New York Times article on the One Laptop Per Child project.

It made me happy that I released most of my work from the past two years to the open source community this week.

Technorati Tags: eben moglen, open source, plone, one laptop per child, olpc

NewsCloud Mentioned on NewAssignment

David Cohn posted about our open source release at NewAssignment:

For obvious reasons open source journalism tends to focus on text and content. The long term goal, however, isn’t just to create individual articles or investigations, but develop a method for citizen journalists to collaborate online. Having an open codebase like NewsCloud’s, with customizable reader pages and nightly autoposting to blogs, will benefit the efforts of anyone trying to create a citizen journalism site. Sharing information, of all kinds, can only help the practice move forward.

Amen. Thanks David.

Link

Technorati Tags: newassignmment, newscloud

Updates on NewsCloud Source Code Release

Thanks everyone for the great responses to our source code release.

Unfortunately, the .htaccess file was left out of the first code distribution, but it's available here until we update the distros.

If you need set up instructions - check out our wiki. If you'd like to help us write the Linux installation notes, that would be welcome.

If you want support, email us or post at our Discussion Forum which we monitor regularly.

Thanks for your support.

-Jeff

Technorati Tags: newscloud

NewsCloud Released as Open Source Media Platform

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.

About NewsCloud

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

NewsCloud Media Platform Open Source Site is Live

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