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Social Networking Sites Opening Their APIs

NewsCloud has an extensvie set of APIs as well. Just visit our Help page for more information.

NewsCloud Featured on 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...

NewsCloud Released as Open Source Media Platform

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.

NewsCloud Publishes Reporting on YouTube's Comedy Central Takedowns

Tonight, NewsCloud publicly released its reporting engine on YouTube's ongoing takedowns of Comedy Central material with its Summary Reports and Video Search. Our video search can only be used to find clips by keyword to determine whether the videos are still available or not. While Viacom has released public statements saying that they were targeting YouTube with requests to take down whole episodes, I found the takedowns to be fairly indiscriminate. For example, 63% of Daily Show clips (and 58% of all shows) taken down were less than 5 minutes in length. We also wanted to get a sense of the number of page views just our subset of video clips had generated for YouTube over time - this also represents potential lost revenue for Viacom. Just the subset of broken clips with view count information left in the Google cache represents 14,867,004 viewings. While the live videos at YouTube represent 23,322,598 viewings. Or, 38,189,602 combined.

YouTube Is Purging Copyrighted Clips

The action was a result of third-party notification by Comedy Central, according to one such e-mail message sent to a YouTube user, Jeff Reifman, who broke the news on the Web site NewsCloud.

NewsCloud Releases Open Media Web Services and API

Today we're announcing the release of the NewsCloud Web Service and APIs as part of our effort to make NewsCloud into a fully open platform for media distribution. Our goal is to expand the potential for citizen journalism by helping developers embrace and extend our work. The NewsCloud web services will allow other community developers to easily interact and expand the stories and features at NewsCloud.com. We hope the result will be a variety of cool mashups, customized Web sites with media content and a better NewsCloud.

Beth's Blog: NewsCloud and other thoughts about collaborative knowledge sharing

Beth has a great write up on NewsCloud that I wanted to share with folks: "Here's what I found interesting about their newsgathering process. They offer multiple strategies for readers to contribute news. ... I love the "two-way synchronization" and makes say "gee whiz" at the collaboration community filtering going on and makes me wonder about how and where the human editing or newsmastering comes into play. Is it all automated? NewsCloud is a fairly new community and will be interesting to where it goes.

NewsCloud Now Allows Original Content Submissions

For a long time, NewsCloud users could submit news stories from around the Web with their comments, but posting original content wasn’t easy. You could post something to your blog and then save it to NewsCloud, but now there is a solution. NewsCloud will now allow you to submit new formatted content to your journal to be featured on our front page.

News brought to you by the average Joe

Blogs have long been a home for personal essays and observations, but they're also a key tool for citizen journalists. Some of the best-known citizen journalism sites started off as blogs, but have since acquired a more professional sheen. A notable example is Talking Points Memo, a well-read, three-employee political blog that its creator says is profitable. "What's powerful about what the Web has done is it allowed a lot more voices and information to make it to the surface than ever before," said Jeff Reifman, a Seattle software developer who worked at Microsoft for eight years. Reifman recently redesigned his news-aggregator site and changed its name from CommonTimes to NewsCloud. But writing is difficult, he said, and it takes time and expertise to cover a "beat." Generally, people who write blogs are not in it to break news. A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life project said that only a third of the 12 million American adults who keep a blog consider them to be journalism.

Idealog: NewsVine and NewsCloud

I put some thoughts together comparing NewsCloud with NewsVine, one of the earlier social network news sites. I also wanted to share a bit more about what NewsCloud is about - our values, etc.

nPost.com Interview with Jeff Reifman, CEO of NewsCloud

Interview with Jeff by Nathan Post on NewsCloud and being an Internet entrepreneur.