NewsCloud's Social Media Community Platform Now Has Easy Install

Our NewsCloud open source community-focused social media platform now offers a simple installation process. Check out the video and learn more.

NewsCloud Receives Knight Foundation Grant to Launch Facebook Sites for Twelve News Organizations

I'm excited to announce that NewsCloud has received a new Knight Foundation grant to continue our work on Facebook applications. The focus of this grant is to work more directly with news organizations and expand our open source development community. Hope you'll check it out...

Through April 2011, twelve news organizations will launch Facebook sites with NewsCloud's open source Facebook application technology, thanks to a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The goal of the grant is threefold:

1. To launch community news sites inside Facebook with twelve media partners showcasing different ways of leveraging the popular social network to reach new audiences. 
2. To improve and expand the features and capabilities of the existing NewsCloud Facebook application.
3. To broaden participation in the open source development community around the NewsCloud Facebook application.

Learn more here

WordPress Plugin for SurfShare Micropayment System

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.

Engaging Youth in News: Facebook Research Findings Released

Earlier this month, we released Dr. Christine Greenhow's research findings from our Facebook application, Hot Dish, which covered climate change news targeted at 16 - 25 year olds.

Encouragingly, we found that publishing news in Facebook improved news-reading habits amongst young people, increased their knowledge about climate change and motivated them to take real world actions in their community. 

We're not the only ones who found this impressive...check out Michele McClellan's post over at the Knight Digital Media Center.

Disclaimer: Both our research and the Knight Digital Media Center is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

How We Caught Missing Wired Magazine Writer Evan Ratliff

In case you missed it, I helped track Evan Ratliff to New Orleans and notified Naked Pizza, an amazing group of folks, who then tracked Evan down in person at a nearby book reading to win the contest.

Please check out the following links:

• How We Caught Missing Wired Magazine Writer Evan Ratliff

• Media Roundup of all the Post-Vanish Contest Appearances by Evan, et al.

• NewsCloud Launches Quick Response VanishTeam Facebook Application to Find Evan Ratliff in Wired's Vanish Competition

Solutions for Community Newspapers in the Age of Facebook and Twitter

I've written a blog post sharing ideas for community newspapers to use Facebook applications to expand their revenue opportunities online, particularly important given this report that the average online reader generates $46 in revenue vs. more than $600 from the average print reader.

As community news organizations grow more vulnerable to financial pressures, current approaches to Web publishing seem increasingly inadequate. To succeed now, news organizations must be willing to think more broadly about their identity and the role of their efforts online. Simply republishing the news on a Web site or a Facebook page will not sufficiently address the revenue needs of most organizations in this climate.

The traditional print publishing model provided a monopoly of sorts that forced advertisers to pay a premium to reach readers who were conditioned to a one way/consumption model for journalism. The evolution of the Internet has changed all this. Advertisers have a variety of options and readers want to consume and participate in the media in new ways.

The rise of social networks and the frequency of link sharing among friends on services such as Twitter and Facebook has not only eroded the editorial role but also contributed to the preexisting general information overload. Improvements in mobile technology are changing the way that readers consume news and the time and space in which publishers have to reach them with content and more importantly, ads. Competing for the "information bandwidth" of overwhelmed readers has never been more competitive while their attention span has never been shorter - and Twitter hasn't even yet saturated the mainstream.

Among oft-mentioned culprits, many publishers blame CraigsList for harming their financials; yet, few tried to leverage their trusted relationship within their communities to offer a competitive product and experience. Instead, most clung to a paid classifieds model online inside cluttered advertising portals. Readers clearly favored the simpler, free CraigsList. CraigsList has a lot of shortcomings but found niches in which to support itself, whereas community news sites simple ceded (and continue to cede) the valuable community service which is classified listings. There are other examples as well, e.g. auctions, city guides, referral services, knowledge bases, dating services, et al. While mindset was the prohibitive factor preventing news organizations from seizing these opportunities, limitations in technology expertise and capacity also remained a complicating factor.

In most communities, news organizations still have one key advantage: a valuable brand and familiar trust with readers. 

It's past time for community news publishers to expand their brands from reporters of news to hosting online town centers that attract and retain the trust and loyalty of their communities. The decline of the newspaper revenue model, the Internet and the evolution of social media are figuratively calling out for publishers to step into this role.

Read the full post here

Community Sharing Tool for Seattle Facebook Members

A new and improved lending library for Seattle is now part of The Needle, a Facebook community application:

See http://seaneedle.com?p=things or http://apps.facebook.com/theneedle/?p=things

The Needle's Things allows you to easily list items and share them with the community at large. Now, you can also restrict items to be visible just by your Facebook friends or within specific Facebook groups and networks. Similarly, you can also use Things to find stuff you want to borrow such as books, CDs, DVDs, household tools, friends with trucks et al. Listing items is easy with our quick Amazon-assisted lookup feature.

You might also enjoy some of the other features at The Needle:

- Answers lets you ask questions of Facebook friends and the Seattle community

- Ideas lets you share your own ideas and comment on others'

- Talk lets you discuss topics related to Seattle (suggest a topic to me if you don't see the one you want listed)

And finally, if you are in support of Referendum 1's Reusable Bag Initiative, you can use The Needle to customize your Facebook profile. In just a few simple steps, you can show your support for this common sense environmental initiative:

http://seaneedle.com/?p=media&o=pro

Nice article on our Facebook News Community applications...

"The question is no longer just a hypothetical one. With increasing convergence between social media and traditional content, what is known as a traditional news website might not exist in the coming years.

Perhaps a revealing example is the creation of Facebook applications by a Seattle-based aggregator, NewsCloud, which received a grant from the Knight Foundation to study how young people receive their news through social networks."

Read The end of news websites? in the Online Journalism Blog.

Run your own Facebook Application Community

I've set up an informational page about our Facebook Application Community News service at the NewsCloud blog. If you're interested in learning more about hiring NewsCloud to run a Facebook application community for your organization, please take a look. I hope to hear from you.

UW Students Launch In:Site, Arts & Culture Mag Powered by NewsCloud

Congrats to the University of Washington's Supraprint journalism class who launched In:Site, a Facebook magazine covering Arts & Culture in Seattle - powered by NewsCloud. I've had the pleasure of going back to school the past few weeks to help the these emerging journalists launch their publication with the Facebook tools our team built for the Knight Foundation grant I received in December 2008.

Please check out In:Site. Invite your friends.

Read the news release.