Architectural Overview of NewsCloud's Social Media Toolkit

Facilitated by Jeff Reifman, newscloud.com

Jeff will cover the state of the Social Media Toolkit in helping mission-driven organizations add social media to their Websites and where it's headed in PHP, Facebook, Drupal and Plone.

notes: newscloud going to talk broadly at first about newscloud: Jeff- create a social media community, news feed that is topic driven, supports digg-style voting, and also wanted to integrate with PHP frame-works. help groups moderate news and share news together. news is a way to bring people back to a site and create on-going engagement. you can create a 'cloud' that is a group of news feeds. set-up links from say wikipedia pages, etc. become a time based page of resouces about a topic. allows for search-engine awareness so they can see comments and community discussions about news.

drupal module: allows you to pull the newscloud from their servers into your drupal site. still needs some work and funding. drupal already had news feeds out of the box, but it is raw feed. Newscloud allows you to work with multiple remote groups to aggregate community feedback. drupalnewsroom module for D5. you need to enter an API key that you get from NewsCloud. option for sharing comments back to the newscloud server or not. each story is created as a node. doesn't support the bookmarklet yet, but you can doing it through newscloud site. goal is to add the bookmarklet button to the drupal moduie so that you are fully using drupal as the UI for newscloud.

all clouds are publicly viewable, but the granularity for privacy control is in the roadmap.

supports a bookmarklet, like del.li.cious when you are browsing the web for news and want to post if to your newscloud.

newscloud will pull RSS feeds from user's delicious feeds, and will correctly tag it as from that user.

PHP client is easy to install. if you want to run multiple publications you can doing from a single install and push out multiple newsclouds. performace on local client is designed to be fast, so a lot of the inteligence is on the local machine, and things are synced in the background to the newscloud server. has n RSS reader that pulls into your server. all the registration is linked into newscloud. different views for the newsclouds. The journal is a collection of user's personal stuff. each reader has their own RSS feed. you can change the templates on the client. is open source. the ad banner can connect to different ad networks.

facebook apps is seemingly difficult and keeps on moving around in the UI. they moved the apps to an area where people don't really look, so app developers are taking a back seat. if interested in developing facebook apps, check out notes from the develping for facebook sesh

On the newscloud site there are user 'scores' that take into account both recent activity and also longevity. also how people rate other people's news picks. empowering people int he community that are improving the community. the higher your user rating the more votes they get to vote on stories. scoring is done on the newscloud servers, so the PHP client is made simple and does not allow for scoring to be kept locally. rewarding the peolple who are strengthening the community.

is users are using their site(ie drupal) to administer their newsclouds, authentication is more of less handled by that site, but newscloud server does check to verify email addresses. You do have to get an API key by registering at newscloud. the theory is the site is responsible for it's user base and newscloud is concerned with trusting the site as a whole.

there is a facebook strategy to offer incentives for people to share news and discuss around news.

wants to build a rails client.