NowPublic Blog

You may have read today’s news about our acquisition of Truemors. For those of you not familiar with the site it is the brainchild of Guy Kawasaki. Guy is a legend in Silicon Valley as a best selling author, VC and one of the early players at Apple — among other things. I’m a big fan of his and am psyched to have him join our team as the Chairman of our advisory group.

In addition to the wealth of Guy’s experience we are also picking up a great group of editors and Trumorists to add to our expanding pool of citizen editors. Welcome to Annie and the rest of the group. We will be working hard to get you all integrated into the NowPublic editorial team and I think you will all be a fantastic edition to our news gathering capabilities.

As you’d expect, an acquisition like this in such a crazed space (those were the words of Michael Arrington) there has been a great deal of press attention. The AFP picked up the story as well as most of the Valley tech media. We’re getting lots of emails and thanks to everyone for their good words.

So day one of the merger seems to be going well. But as with any new success there are sometimes some growing pains. NowPublic is weathering the traffic barrage well but truemors is having a tough time staying online. This has provided our tech team with a good opportunity to get to know the Truemors servers a little earlier than we had planned ☺ Rest assured, Truemors is in good hands and we’ll have it back on his feet in no time. Stay tuned!

Michael.

NowPublic

Tags: New York | San Francisco | Vancouver | NowPublic | citizen journalism | Journalism | Guy Kawasaki | Tech & Biz | truemors

We’re introducing a comprehensive member ranking system on NowPublic. Essentially it’s a way to identify the most active and effective newshounds on the site.Your stats - number of stories, comments, “good stuffs” etc.- will be counted and compared with other members to create an extensive leaderboard. Each action on the site will be weighted differently in determining scores (hint: the most influential stats are stories, comments, good stuffs, and front page stories). Details will be tweaked as we go along, and we’ll be looking for feedback to improve it. Let us know your thoughts in the forum once you’ve checked it out. 

10.18am PST: We have taken NowPublic offline temporarily to address some front-page routing issues… this shouldn’t take long. We apologize for the outage and shall get back online as soon as possible. 

Midnight at the Database Oasis

 

 

We will be taking the site offline for scheduled database maintenance. These repairs will be taking place tonight, May 8th, at midnight PST… the witching hour. This downtime will last for an hour, with a slight possibility of a longer outage in the event of unforeseen difficulties. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Member pages are changing in a big way. No longer static, these elements of the NowPublic community are now yours to control.The big additions are the Channel and the Dashboard. In a nutshell, the Channel is the “you” that other members see, and the Dashboard is your custom view of NowPublic.

Are you ready? Let’s begin.

The first thing you’ll notice when you navigate to your own member page is the Channel page: like all good channels, this one can provide a depth of programming for your viewers.

You can customize this page to show the world what you want them to see: your stories, your newsworthy photos and video, and also your stream, which is a real-time tracker of your contributions to NowPublic, along with any other RSS feeds you want us to see… Flickr, Twitter, your blog, whatever you want. You can share as much or as little as you like from your non-NowPublic web presence. Just click on “Edit” and you can customize any of these widgets.

Along the left of the Channel page are your vital statistics: user photo, total number of page views racked up by your stories, and how those stories have fared. Also visible are your external links, the topics you write about most often, and your recent comments.

Now that your Channel is lined up, you can go over to the next tab: the Dashboard. Think you can make a better front page? Now’s your chance.

As the name suggests, the Dashboard puts you in the driver’s seat of NowPublic. While the Front Page is controlled by a combination of page views, flagging, and editor curation, the Dashboard is all you: customize these widgets to keep your finger on the pulse of NowPublic. Each module can be configured to show anything from recent comments to a constant stream of incoming images, to everything in between. It’s your call. Simply click “Add new item”, and a new widget will be generated. Want to change an existing widget? Click on the little arrow in the upper right and edit away. These can be minimized or deleted as well, also via the buttons on the upper right of each widget.

That’s not all: you can drag and drop your dashboard elements until you reach a state of Dashboard feng shui.

Okay, put the Dashboard away and head over to the Edit Profile tab… this should look familiar, but with a new item: your toolbox. You can let the rest of the NowPublic community know which tools you use for your reporting: do you have the latest and greatest all-in-one superphone, or, like me, do you go lo-fi? Whatever you add here will become visible on your Channel page.

The Edit Settings page is largely unchanged, but the new format means less scrolling. Nice.

The Messages section has filters for which types of private messages you see, how you like them ordered, and, for multi-message actions, which ones you want to select or un-select.

Go forth and customize!

Play, experiment, and let us know what works for you (and what doesn’t) in the comments section below. These new pages are in beta, so your feedback is important to us.

Internship in Community Relations and Content Support

We are looking for talented individuals with interest in news media, marketing and business communications to engage with NowPublic contributors and locate newsworthy multimedia content for the site.

Key responsibilities:

- Participate in weekly content team meetings, contributing ideas on recruitment strategy and retention of contributors

- Recruit citizen and mobile journalists on the web for NowPublic.com
- Source multimedia footage for use on NowPublic.com
- Work on breaking and continuing news stories
- Build a network of contributors to provide first-rate news coverage

The ideal candidate will have:
- Good written and oral communication skills
- An eye for newsworthy photos and video
- An understanding of online technologies
- Marketing or business communications background
- A pro-active and flexible approach

*Internship Participants are eligible for hire based on performance and interest.

*Internships are eligible for performance based compensation.

For dates and schedules or for more information, please contact jobs*at*nowpublic.com with your internship goals, educational background and any history you have with news, social media, web 2.0 or internet start-up.

This is an ongoing opportunity.

Greetings loyal, NowPublic reader.

If you’re reading this after 9am EST, you’ll hopefully have noticed that NowPublic content is now ad-supported.

As you know we have survived to date in an ad-free environment but as we go from being a crazy idea that was once run out of my garage into a real news service we need to pay the bills. For now advertising seems to be one of the best ways to do it. In the very near future we plan on letting our contributors (hopefully that is you) participate in sharing ad revenue. We have some good ideas on how to do this but we’d love to hear yours too. Let us know what you think here.

Your humble servant,

Michael.

Holidays done? Check! Back to the daily grind? Check!

New flags? Check!!

That’s right–now it’s easier than ever before to flag other user’s stories as Good Stuff. Here are the new flags at home in their toolbox:

And here’s what it looks like when you put them to work:

Why the change? Well, we figured we’d put all the tools in one place so that you can have easy access to them if you want, but they wouldn’t get in the way of your viewing or reading experience if you didn’t feel like doling out the Good Stuff just yet.

Enjoy! And, as always give us your Feedback or ask questions in the comments–we’re happy to answer them.

This week was another biggie for us–we rolled out a bunch of new features and tools that will add speed, style and substance (the three S’s!) to your NowPublic experience.First there’s our new comments:

They’re sleeker, easier to read, and closer to the top of the story. Now when you want reply to a comment, all you have to do is hover over it. Also, comments posted by new users who contributed a photo from Flickr will have a link to that photo in the comment:

One reason the comments have moved up on the page is because we rolled out our new Crowd Power tool. It’s now a layer that pops out when you choose, so you can request photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube to your stories when you want to, or just go right to the comments if you don’t (but you do, of course).

Clicking on the button beside Crowd Power opens the new layer, which now shows more photos at a time and has a better, friendlier interface. And, since it lives on top of the page instead of in it, your page loads faster. Check it out:

Whew. Yes, we’ve been busy, and made a lot of changes in an effort to improve your NowPublic experience. Take a look at a story page, see how these changes effect you, and let us know by commenting here. We’re listening.

It’s a big one this week, friends–we introduced an entirely new welcome page for people coming to us through Flickr requests.

If you’re a member of NowPublic, your first contact with the site is likely through Flickr. If you had a great photo we wanted to use to add context to a news story, we’d contact you and ask you to share it. Joining and sharing your photo was the gateway to being a member–posting stories, sharing more photos, making comments, and flagging other peoples’ work.

This is all still true, but now first time users sharing their Flickr photos are greeted by our fancy new welcome page:

As you can see, this shows you your photo in the story page and allows you to make a comment on the story or tell us how you managed to get that great shot. This way, you’ll be more engaged with the story and the site.

And if you’re puzzled as to what this all is about, have no fear–you can click on the “Questions?” bar on the right hand side of the screen, which will open a tab that allows to you to ask an on-duty editor a question and get a speedy response. Voila!

Cool beans! Got questions? Post ‘em here (as comments), and we’ll answer them!