I am happy to share an early testing release of the NewsCloud Social Media Toolkit with you.

What is it?

The Social Media Toolkit (SMT), is an open source platform designed to help organizations run community-driven, topic-based and geo-centric news websites, similar to NewsCloud.com, albeit simpler and more streamlined. You can see examples of the SMT running here: http://election.newsi.us, http://sarahpalin.newsi.us, http://seattle.newsi.us, http://tech.newsi.us and http://climate.newsi.us. The alpha release is a preliminary testing release to gather feedback from organizations and open source developers. The initial alpha feature set and design/stylesheets are very basic - but show the potential of the new toolkit. We hope to add more features and improve the default design in the near future.

What can I do with the Social Media Toolkit

Essentially, you can quickly set up and publish one or more topic-specific news sites with great social media features such as registration, voting, comments, newswires, posting and resource links. Stories are initially seeded from NewsCloud's topic clouds. It's easy to create new topic clouds if you want to. (During the test period, the SMT is restricted to approved clouds. If you would like to propose a new topic related to your organization or are interested in using the SMT for commercial purposes, please email us.) Organizations with similar missions can also collaborate to moderate specific topics.

Learn more about the Social Media Toolkit