Following a tip from JD Lasica, I took a long look at NowPublic.com, a very interesting experiment in social news gathering and dissemination.
The premise is pure swarm logic: individual contributors create news stories, and may hyperlocalize them down to the country, state, and city level, as well as adding any sort of tag that might be used to characterize them. Visitors can find leading stories through most recent or most popular views, or by searching by tags, keywords, or location. The use of tags is facilitated by the prominent provision of a tag cloud at the top of any view.
Registered users can additionally vote on new stories, increasing their popularity, and moving them to the top of the search results for key words, tags, and general popularity. In this way, the "front page" is laid out based on the collective social gestures of thousands of registered users. Note that in true blogospheric fashion, there are as many potential "front pages" as there are keywords and tags: a front page for every interest, passion, or obsession.
I signed to fool with the site, and discovered that I was user #4324, based on how my first story's url was structured. The user interface was simple, and I rapidly created the following piece, about an antiwar concert scheduled on my birthday, in DC:
I have already received 24 votes!
NowPublic provides a great level of control on the sharing of "footage" -- imagery of various sorts. I have not experimented with that element of the service, but I intend to do so.
NowPublic allows contributors to pull stories from other locations -- such as blogs -- via RSS. I set things up so that entries that I post at my personal blog, A Working Model, are now accessible for reposting at NowPublic. Here's the RSS feed selection interface:
And the resulting story, reposted from my blog:
For those not already blogging elsewhere, NowPublic provides free basic blogging, and supports RSS feeds from them. Oddly enough, blog posts are not automatically posted as stories, and importing through the RSS feeds doesn't work: NowPublic gives an error message when I try to import my NowPublic blog content as news stories (although I was able to import that feed into Feedigest, and to import the exported feed from Feeddigest). Also odd: none of the tag or rating architecture that supports news stories have been integrated in the blogging technology: there is no way that authors can tag their blog posts and readers cannot search via tag cloud, nor rate blog posts. A strange omission, perhaps intended to get folks to push their blog posts into the NowPublic news channel.
All in all, I am fascinated by what NowPublic represents, on many levels. As a student of citizen journalism, NowPublic represents a great example of the power that social architecture, well-implemented, can put into the hands of everyday people: the power to shape, channel, and make explicit the implicit dialogue that underlies news coverage. As someone tracking the adoption of social architecture, I believe that NowPublic demonstrates the key elements of all future, successful social media, in particular the primacy of emergent, bottom-up characterization by tags and the importance of aggregated social gestures -- in this case "votes". As the president of Corante, I have specific interest in the ways that social architecture principles -- like tag clouds and user ratings -- are likely to become a commonplace in the world of social media, and how quickly we at Corante should be adopting them for our own publishing.
I had a chance to speak briefly with Michael Tippett, the founder of NowPublic, and he stated that NowPublic is a work in progress, and that recent spikes in activity -- particularly around Katrina -- have accelerated plans to streamline and scale the implementation. His interest is twofold, I was glad to hear. First, to support the NowPublic website, as an interesting activity in and of itself, and as a showcase of the design elements of the NowPublic technology, and second, to license the technology to others seeking to apply it in similar ways.
I can't make a judgment on NowPublic's likely impact on conventional media, although I beleive that all media outlets will find themselves going through "social shock" in the next few years -- being redefined and reworked by social architecture. NowPublic's experiment suggests just how radical a change that may be.
1. Calder Lorenz on November 21, 2005 07:19 PM writes...
Hi,
We’ve quietly been working on the next release of NowPublic and it is now – finally - in testing. We still have a few seats left in our beta group so if you’re interested in getting an advanced viewing before we launch please let me know.
In the coming weeks I’ll post additional details here but please feel free to contact me in the meantime. My email address is clorenz(at)nowpublic(dot)com.
Best,
Calder Lorenz,
Permalink to CommentDirector, Contributor Relations, NowPublic.com
2. Calder Lorenz on December 2, 2005 03:35 PM writes...
Hi,
As promised, here are the details…
It looks like the NowPublic V3 beta program will be starting next week. Let me know if you want to join us. We’d be very interested in what you think. My email address is clorenz(at)nowpublic(dot)com.
Thanks,
Permalink to CommentCalder
Email: clorenz@nowpublic.com
3. Calder Lorenz on January 24, 2006 11:33 PM writes...
Hey,
As promised, here are the details about NowPublic V3
We will be going live tomorrow between 6am and 6pm (pending the servers showing up to work). You can find a sneak peak here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clorenz/
Feel free to drop me a note with your comments. Thanks. My email address is
clorenz(at)nowpublic(dot)com.
Yrs,
Permalink to CommentCalder
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