Yahoo Moves Aggressively into Crowdsourced Local Content

Posted on 26. Aug, 2010 by Toby in The Publishing Industry

Paid Content today reported that Yahoo is moving into producing much more local content and that it is going to be using its recently acquired AssociatedContent platform to produce the content via crowdsourcing.

Yahoo will likely have good success with the strength of its online presence and the effectiveness of the crowdsourcing model in heading into this segment. The question for other local publishers: what do you do know? Acquire your own crowdsourced platform (Associated Content cost $100M). Or maybe obtain a crowdsourced content platform / virutal newsroom though a SaaS partnership?

New Release: Bug Squashing

Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

We pushed out a new release today on Kapost. We’ve updated the moderation queue so you can now promote content directly from there.   Also, we fixed some connectivity problems that caused some users to think they were connected to the WordPress (or other) sites when they actually weren’t. Some other fixes:

  • You can now add an image from a URL with a https label
  • If you’ve customized your background color, your article pages will look ok now
  • You can now set your Primary site’s name in the “Connect” area on Settings so the link in your upper left area shows a name instead of a URL
  • A big bug that occurred if you uploaded a user image from Settings has been removed

As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions or bugs in our forum.  Thanks!

Javascript Widget is Now Available

Posted on 21. Jul, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

We did a big release today that saw 2 big improvements:

  1. Connection Options. We added a javascript widget so anyone, on any platform can add the ability for someone to contribute.  If you’re on WordPress, Moveable Type or some other platforms, you can still push these submissions back to our site.  We also added documentation of our API in case you have a custom platform
  2. Improvements on installing the service.  There was some confusion as to how the Newsroom works and what you need to do to get going.  As a result, we’ve brought back the Setup Manager which provides step by step instructions on how to get going

As always we have lots of bug fixes under the hood too, such as corrected registration problems.  Please use our forum to add in any more comments or suggestions you might have

New Name: Kapost (plus a release)

Posted on 10. Jul, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Company Updates, Releases

Welcome to Kapost!

Many of you know us as Grogger but as of today we’re officially rebranding ourselves as Kapost. You can now find us on Twitter at kapostful and on Facebook here.

In addition to changing our name, we did a big release of our plugin and add-on service today. You can now:

  • Categories. If you have WordPress categories, you can choose to use those in your contributor’s posts.
  • Custom URL. If you want to use your own URL with Kapost, you can do that by simply changing your A-Name record
  • Auto-Promote. You can set the Kapost service to auto-send content to your blog if it receives a certain number of votes. This empowers your community to tell you what content is the best. Also, if you set this value to 0, content will flow immediately into your blog

As part of our new name change, you’ll need to install the new Kapost plugin. You can find that inside WordPress by simply searching for “Kapost”

As always, let us know if you have any problem or suggestions by either contacting us or placing that info into our forum

WordPress Plugin Available

Posted on 28. Jun, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

It’s been an interesting month as we’ve been busy developing a version of Grogger that can work with any WordPress blog.  In the past, we heard from lots of you that you love Grogger, but don’t want to move off your own platform.  We heard you loud and clear and as a result we now have an alpha version of a plugin that will place a widget on your blog that will allow anyone to submit a piece of content.

Specifically, the plugin:

  • Places a widget on the right side module
  • Creates a new “Community” section associated with your site where all the submissions live
  • Allows anyone to easily register when posting.  They can use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others
  • Allows the owner of the site to view any submission, and if they like it, they can push it back to their WordPress blog

Go ahead, give it a try.  It’s still in Alpha so we’d love any feedback you can (contact us)

Here’s a video demonstrating the plugin functionality

Forbes to go Crowdsourced

Posted on 14. Jun, 2010 by Toby in Blog Posts, PubSocially, The Publishing Industry

Today David Ewalt, an editor at Forbes, live-tweeted a company meeting. In it Louis Dvorkin, the former CEO of True/Slant, which was recently acquired by Forbes, laid out a new bold strategy for Forbes. Here are the tweets (most to least recent):

Value for contributors isn’t explicitly defined yet. My own take: there will be both financial & non-financial rewards based on yr. audience

A couple people asking if this is HuffPo model — my answer would be no, it’s more entrepreneurial, about developing wide swaths of talent
If you are interested in writing about travel, real estate, wine, food, cars, sports, health –any forbes lifestyle topic– drop me a line!
Meeting adjourned! The big takeaway: If you have something smart or unique to say to the world, we’ll make it our job to help you say it
Reorganizational details tbd – this is more about philosophical direction
Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent. We will help you develop your own brand and talent
If anyone has questions I’ll try to ask it if you hurry.
Lewis calls it “incentive based entrepreneurial journalism.” This isn’t about trying to get people to give us content with no reward.
Forbes’ original reporting and investigation not going away. We’re adding a level 2 bottom of the pyramid: 1000s of outside contributors
The big idea: We are looking to significantly expand our stable of outside contributors. A merger of Forbes brand & the True/Slant model.
New Forbes edit boss Lewis Dvorkin having meeting right now with his editors. He says it’s on the record, so I’m tweeting from it live.

Seems to be a really courageous and I think effective new path for Forbes.

Interestingly Paul Carr later in the day let loose on TechCrunch about how foolish he thinks this strategy to be:

There are almost not enough words to describe how wrong-headed this move is: Forbes’ online editorial standards are already in the toilet and Dvorkin has just yanked on the flush. Not only will this new breed of hacks add thousands of pages of self-promotional, unedited (Forbes simply doesn’t have the resources to monitor thousands of contributors) drivel to Forbes.com but, by lowering the barrier to entry to anyone with a keyboard, the publication will also scare away those top tier contributors – captains of industry, statesmen and the like – who are prepared to pen a free article for Forbes just for the kudos that comes from being asked.

Old habits die hard.

The Blog: Becoming the Default Publishing Format

Posted on 27. May, 2010 by Toby in Blog Posts, PubSocially, The Publishing Industry

Today Newsweek re-launched its site with a new design. It’s great: simple & clear.

It’s funny how it’s very much a blog in its appearance, with a stream of stories. Two column.

More and more media are ditching their crazy, confusing layouts where they try to satisfy everyone in the turf-war for homepage space. Instead the simple two-column-with-stream layout pioneered by blogs will continue to take over more and more designs.

So how long until the New York Times ditches its 5-column zig-zag mess?

Grogger as an Add-on Service

Posted on 25. May, 2010 by Toby in Company Updates

Most every time we talk to a publisher about Grogger they get excited. They recognize the power around letting their audience contribute posts, how that can drive engagement, better content and more content. And they see how Grogger’s tools to help them attract and filter that content are key to making it all happen.

But then there’s the leap they have to take: switching from their existing system to the Grogger system. And while many folks continue to sign up for Grogger, we’ve concluded that many more would–particularly those with existing sites–if we could reduce the leap.

Thus, we’ve started to work on “Grogger as an Add-On Service.” If you’ve ever used UserVoice or GetSatisfaction you’ll know how they allow you to quickly add “user feedback” on to your existing site. Grogger is going to do the same thing for user contribution / posts. And instead of a CMS migration, it’ll just take the install of a plug-in or some javascript. With no disruption to your site or even work, you’ll just be able to try out the power of social publishing, for free.

You can see the beginnings of what we’re doing in these rough wireframed use cases.

We would be eager for your feedback. We’re putting together a list of early beta users. If you’re interested, please let us know, and we’ll keep you in the loop as our development progresses, learn from your requirements, and give you early access to our system.

The plan for the first release is a Wordpress plug-in as well as an API that will allow integration for any platform. Over time we’ll build more plug-ins for other CMS platforms. We’d appreciate feedback on this as well.

We’re really looking forward to making it much easier for publishers to bring the power of social publishing into their sites.

WaPo creates community-powered political site

Posted on 17. May, 2010 by Toby in PubSocially, The Publishing Industry

The Washington Post has launched a new site, the “Political Blog Network.” Harvard’s Nieman Lab reports that it “is packaging content written by unpaid bloggers, hoping to engage its audience, give writers a platform, and make some money selling ads.” It notes the significant shift for a major media company like WaPo to utlilize the model where “a small number of professionals are paid to curate the work of many more unpaid writers.” The article notes how the compensation for the contributors is not cash but rather distribution and exposure.

New Grogger Commercial

Posted on 13. May, 2010 by Toby in Company Updates, How-To's

Check out our new Grogger commercial. What do you think? We’d appreciate your feedback!

Older Entries »