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

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

Raise Awareness for Polar Bear Survival!

Raise awareness for Polar Bear survival! Use Hot Dish to add a floating polar bear with a lifejacket to your profile photo... Get your Polar Bear ON now... 

 

NewsCloud Consulting Launches GenOmics Facebook application

Today, we launched GenOmics on Facebook for our client Genome Alberta with a new community feature "Send a Gene!" 

The GenOmics application has all the great news community features of our other Facebook applications but allows members to send fun iconic representations of real genes to each other's Facebook friends.

Read more

Three Benefits for Web Applications Developing inside Facebook

As Facebook has grown to over two hundred million users, they've done an extremely good job preventing spammers from creating fake accounts and harassing members. As you create a new Facebook account, they require a number of captcha's and checks to make sure the person is real and has real friends.

Facebook accounts are essentially a white list of users that have been incrementally vetted by the service and their real world friends. It's much harder to create a number of fake Facebook accounts than it is to create fake email accounts on a service like gmail or yahoo. 

As a result, when you run a Facebook application, you gain a few key side benefits that I think are unique to the Web right now:

1) Less spam and e-marketing

On a normal Website, people register with email addresses that don't provide the website operator with very much information about them. New accounts can easily post spam and marketing links to your site. With Facebook applications, this rarely happens.

I see far more spam and e-marketing on NewsCloud.com's website than on our Facebook-based news community applications e.g. Hot Dish and MnDaily.

2) More civilized dialogue; less abuse

Facebook's built-in social accountability leads to higher quality content and less undesired remarks. Because Facebook comments are often re-published to the Facebook stream which is seen by the member's friends, they are more accountable to their own real world social network for what they say.

Furthermore, Facebook comments are published with user's real names (see below), not handles that conceal their identity.

With our Facebook news community applications, I'm seen almost no abuse.

3) Good enough authentication

When a Facebook member with 100+ friends arrives at my Facebook application community, I can be pretty certain they are who they say they are. As Facebook members confirm more friends on their account, you can be incrementally more sure.

This just isn't the case with a typical Web registrant with a gmail or Yahoo email account.

While this isn't sufficient on its own for e-commerce, it's pretty good for the purpose of most Web-driven communities. e.g. showing a leaderboard of members to our community

In Closing

Theoretically, you could also gain these benefits by using Facebook Connect on your website or by implementing a tiered registration system which streamlined activity permissions for Facebook Connect registrants.

You can learn more about our Facebook news community applications here.