The NewsCloud Blog

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!

NewsCloud's Facebook Application Featured on ReadWriteWeb

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

Try the Comedy Central Video Application on Facebook

I've put together a new Facebook application for browsing, watching and sharing Comedy Central videos from all the shows that they provide RSS feeds for.

Install the Comedy Central Video application for Facebook

Install the NewsCloud application for Facebook

Technorati Tags: comedy central, facebook

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

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

Help beta test the NewsCloud Facebook Application

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

NetSquared Tuesday Launches in Seattle June 5, 2007

We're co-organizing the first NetSquared event in Seattle next Tuesday for social software and nonprofit types to meet, socialize and brainstorm on what future community meetings might look like.

My colleague Sarah Schacht of Knowledge As Power and I are co-organizing the kickoff of Seattle's first Net2 Tuesday. NetSquared is a Tech Soup venture to increase the adoption of Web 2.0 services by nonprofit organizations and others interested in creating a social benefit. The goal of NetTuesday is to create an ongoing peer-driven community event for the development of social software and real world applications in Seattle.

This is the first Net2 Tuesday in Seattle, so we're focusing the time mostly to talk to each other about what we'd like to get out of events like this. Please email your friends about this event. Everyone is welcome.

When: Tuesday, June 5th
Time: 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Where: The McLeod Residence, 2209 2nd Ave, Seattle, WA 98121 (2nd floor).
Recurring: First Tuesdays of each month, exact details to be determined

Read more

Technorati Tags: net tuesdays, net2, seattle

Knight News Challenge Winners Announced; MIT Tops List With $5 Million

Editor and Publisher reports the MIT Media Lab received a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation "to create a Center for Future Civic Media to develop, test, and study new forms of high-tech community news." Other winners included $700k to MTV for mobile youth journalists to cover the 2008 election. ChicagoCrime received $1.1M "to create a series of city-specific Web sites devoted to public records and hyper-local information" and VillageSoup received $885K "to build free software to allow others to replicate the citizen journalism and community participation." E & P also reports "Eleven other grants of between $25,000 and $340,000 were awarded...[and]...nine bloggers will each get $15,000 to blog about topics ranging from GPS tracking devices to 'out-of-the-box' community publishing solutions." Congrats to all the winners!

For the rest of us, there's always next year. Entries start up for 2007 July 1st, but are more narrowly focused than last year:

Anybody, anywhere in the world is eligible for funding — if the project meets all of the following criteria:

1. Use digital media.
2. Involve new forms of news in the public interest.
3. Focus on specific geographic community.

NewsCloud entered its open source platform in 2006. Although we were asked to submit a secondary application, we were not selected as a winner.

Technorati Tags: knight foundation, news challenge, knight foundation winners

Traffic statistics for Yahoo and Google News vs. other news sites

Yahoo and Google News are truly behemoths in news aggregation on the Web. All these statistics are based on Alexa data (so accuracy may vary) but Google News has 5 to 10 times the reach of MSNBC, the Guardian UK, the New York Times and Digg (Yahoo News is similar). Click to enlarge the images.

If you take Google News out, you can see that Digg has greater reach with Alexa users than other news Web sites including the New York Times.

In the technology space, Digg and News.com are more widely read by Alexa users than Slashdot, Engadget or TechCrunch:

Now you can read Paul's take on why you should ignore Alexa stats:

Josh Pigford, the creator of The Apple Blog, has posted an extremely well-written rant of sorts regarding the major flaw with Alexa website traffic statistics. Alexa is a serviced owned by Amazon that provides website traffic statistics based on information collected from web surfers with the Alexa toolbar installed. The problem is that the Alexa toolbar only runs on Internet Explorer on Windows machines, effectively voiding every single alternative browser and Mac user.

Technorati Tags: alexa, digg, google news, msnbc, new york times, newscloud, traffic statistics, yahoo news

Effect of New York Times Sharing Feature on Facebook, Digg and Newsvine

Since December 11th, 2006 when the New York Times announced it's sharing feature, Facebook traffic has risen rapidly but Digg and Newsvine have gradually declined in traffic. These statistics are based on Alexa, so take them with a grain of salt. Does anyone know what might have triggered Facebook's rise in traffic other than the New York Times integration?

Technorati Tags: digg, facebook, new york times, new york times sharing, newsvine

Slashdot Adopts Sloppy Form of Digg Ratings

The Slashdot Firehose was unpolished, but this is pathetic:

April fools? It's still Mar31 here...

Technorati Tags: firehose, slashdot, slashdottit, slashrating

Google AdSense API Should Support Growth of User Generated Content Communities

While you have to be a computer scientist to understand what Google is offering with its AdSense API, I think it will be a boon to user generated content communities like NewsCloud that decide to share revenue with contributors.

Essentially, the AdSense API lets a site like NewsCloud publish ads to pages that the contributor posts on our sites e.g. your NewsCloud journal or a specific NewsCloud story that you post. Then, Google manages the revenue share that NewsCloud as publisher chooses. It's all automated and fairly transparent.

So, for example, a NewsCloud contributor could be paid from 25 to 100 percent of the revenue generated from ads placed on the pages of the stories they contribute as well as their journal and group pages.

The Google API certainly provides an automated, robust solution for publishers to share revenue with contributors. I'm not sure if we'll adopt the model but I know that we'll consider it strongly. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Technorati Tags: advertising, google adsense, adsense api, newscloud, user generated content

NewsCloud Called Digg for Grown Ups

A friend forwarded a second hand review of NewsCloud which summarized it as, "NewsCloud looks like a Digg for grown ups." Funny.

Of course, NewsCloud is also open source and offers an extensive API whereas Digg does not. Also, Digg has about twenty full time employees and we have one unpaid staffer.

Technorati Tags: digg, newscloud

Daylife opens beta site - heavy traffic slows site

Daylife opened for business today and seems to have been greatly slowed by traffic, but reviews haven't been kind either. The article links to a site that claims that Daylife has more investors than employees. That's not entirely unusual in a startup - but still makes me glad we've kept NewsCloud small so far.

Technorati Tags: daylife

Overcoming hate speech and intolerance in vibrant communities

The time we've taken to build the NewsCloud platform has given us some time to gradually build our own community and take our time in coming up with rules. So, we often face challenges we haven't formally addressed or written software to address.

Yesterday, my Canadian friend SheMuses, an experienced technologist, newbie blogger and NewsCloud user, asked me if I could do something about an offensive comment posted on NewsCloud which appeared on a story in her journal.

The comment was posted in response to the story about GOP Rep. Virgil Goode's letter decrying the election of the Dem. Rep. Keith Ellison, a muslim:

Rep. Goode is on track recommending forbidding immigration of Muslims. The old saw they’re not all bad – but where is any outrcy from Musliums living in America .
about those barbarians who are killing Americans , parading in the streets shouting Death to America burning and defacing our flag . They are religious fanatics filled with hatred and we don’t need their kind here in America..
For Saslaw’s comments – just just another CYA – he doesn’t see the danger to America’s security.What’s his position on Mexican-order immigration? Those clowns on Capitol Hill with their 3-day work week don’t care about the nation – they’re simply protecting their seats of power. I have no respect for them with their earmarks that we taxpayers must fund.

While I find the material offensive as well (aside from the earmarks part), I felt that the poster was expressing their own opinion sincerely - and not ranting or intending to be abusive. I read the comment more in terms of ignorance and intolerance than outrageous behavior. To me, these are opportunities to foster more thoughtful discussions, a chance to strengthen understanding and community - whereas censorship might cut that process short. Therefore, I decided to remove the story from SheMuses' journal rather than to delete the comment. The story still appears on NewsCloud.

One thing that concerns me is whether leaving the comment up makes some people e.g. SheMuses or muslims, uncomfortable reading NewsCloud or being active participants of our evolving community. If I get more feedback that this is the case, I'd reconsider my decision. SheMuses expressed to me discomfort in responding directly with the commenter, which I can understand. She didn't want this material linked to her journal. Ultimately though, I'd like to establish more tools in NewsCloud to allow the community to police itself and develop its own values and code of conduct. The administrator should only step in as a last resort. Perhaps journal users should be able to filter how comments appear on their personal pages, like Friendster does with its comments.

Technorati Tags: code of honor, gpl, hate speech, keith ellison, newscloud, online community, social networks, terms of use, virgil goode

Knight Foundation News Challenge Letters Due Shortly

Well folks, we're pretty psyched because we got our letter of inquiry for NewsCloud into the Knight Foundation today. If you're an aspiring citizen journalist or have a citizen media project, we hope you've already seen this. The deadline is December 31, 2006.

Good luck with your applications!

Knight Foundation News Challenge (might be down at the minute - this URL works)

Technorati Tags: knight foundation, NewsChallenge

Digg Struggling to Broaden Appeal

It's interesting to watch Digg struggle to broaden its appeal beyond technology readers. Today, the top posts are mostly technology and feature "YouParkLikeAnAssHole.com".

They have such a huge tech audience - it will be interesting to see what techniques they employ to reach out to others. Or, will they settle for being the juvenile social network for those tired of Slashdot.

Technorati Tags: citizen journalism, digg

Digg's redesign looks a lot like NewsCloud

Is it just me or does Digg's new redesign look a lot more like NewsCloud's navigation? I think the single column list will eventually be replaced as well.

Technorati Tags: digg, digg redesign

Post links to your new media projects here

As someone working without venture funding on an open source project, it can be hard to get the word out and attract people to your site. If you are working on a new media project that you'd like to tell people about, email me and I'll probably be willing to post a link to it here.

Projects should have some social benefit. They should not be funded by venture capital - those projects can buy their own marketing. Please email me the link and a 3 sentence description of what's cool about your work.

Note: I may post links in summary form rather than individual postings.

Good luck in your efforts.

Email projects to me here or post them as comments below.

Technorati Tags: new media, citizen journalism, marketing

New York Times partners with Digg, Facebook and Newsvine

John Cook reports that the New York Times has added a sharing feature for readers to post their content to Digg, Facebook and Newsvine as well as a long overdue permalink for their stories.

The sharing feature will not be used on TimesSelect stories, the newspaper's premium content offering, nor will it be available on staff blogs or wire stories

Christine Topalian, manager of strategic planning and business development at NYTimes.com, said it was looking for ways to tap a tech-savvy audience that is accustomed to commenting on and sharing news stories. ... The Times would not rule out adding comments to stories directly on NYTimes.com. Other partners may be added, though Topalian said the company was happy to start with Digg, Newsvine and Facebook.

I think it's great to see the New York times experiment with a distributed network impact rather than building comments directly on their site, though I expect they will eventually do that too.

I agree with GigaOm that:

"Discussions or not, it is about capturing them page views, and it is not a bad move, though I question how much traffic Facebook and Newsvine can drive to the Times."

I think the Times sees this as a dipping their toe into a space they don't presently have technology to address. This is a way to experiment and innovate without taking much risk at all. Still, it seems like a gift-horse for the Newsvine folks - exposure to a very large established audience and the credibility of the paper of record.

Cook reports:

"Davidson declined to comment when asked if The New York Times had considered investing in Newsvine. He said there is no revenue-sharing agreement, adding that it is simply a technology deal."

Editor & Publisher had some additional Times quotes:

"We"re very excited about offering our readers a new tool to share their favorite New York Times content," said Vivian Schiller, NYTimes.com senior vice president and general manager, in a statement. "This new capability extends the Web-based conversation while encouraging new communities of readers to share and discuss a wide range of interests, whether by linking to an article about politics from their homepage or adding coverage of world news to their blogs."

It's not clear what this move means for smaller, independent and open source efforts like NewsCloud. Clearly, it doesn't make our job easier - but I'm not sure the long term impact will be that big. The New York Times is leaving the door open to other partners... let's just hope they don't end up looking like this:

If the New York Times decides they really want to extend discussion of their content to bloggers, they should support blogging APIs such as Flickr has done. This allows any New York Times reader to post directly to their blog from the New York Times Web site.

Additionally, they could create a generic API for third party services to hook into that allows New York Times readers to select the bookmarking services that they want to use e.g. del.icio.us, et al.

An interesting footnote in the Cook article was that it said Newsvine "has raised about $1 million in venture financing" last year, whereas Cook previously reported Newsvine was "Backed with less than $5 million from Second Avenue Partners". I always wondered what "less than $5 million" meant, now we know.

Technorati Tags: digg, facebook, new york times, newsvine, sharing