Crunchberry Project

The goal of the first release was to demonstrate different ways of thinking about how foster communities and conversations around news articles on the web, and not to build a real news website or software to power a real news website.

Version 1.0 of News Mixer is a standalone application built on Python and Django. It is meant as a technology demo. For those who liked the ideas and wanted the software, News Mixer is a great commenting system, but it lacks depth. There was very little time put into anything but the commenting. The content management component is minimal. There is no support for posting media. There was a lot of thought but little dev time put into comment moderation, either for site owners or visitors. It’s what happens when you only have 11 weeks to go from “you can do whatever you want” to working software + report + polished presentation.

Despite the minimalism of News Mixer 1.0, it was a hit. People were impressed and inspired by it. So for a tech demo it was a success. Now to make it usable …

Usefulness

Yes, there will be a Wordpress plugin.

The next release of News Mixer will be a more useful application built to actually be used by folks. The plan is to build an API on top of News Mixer and build a plug-in to make the features available for Wordpress. In addition to an API, we’re going to give News Mixer the ability to handle commenting for multiple sites.

Why not just put all the commenting features into a Wordpress plug in?

So the wheel re-invention is kept to a minimum. So we can plug the features into other applications without writing everything from scratch. So folks can manage the comments for many sites in one place. And so maybe it will grow up to be its own web service someday.

There is a big list of things that our team came up with that could make News Mixer better: more commenting systems, rating systems, moderation. But right now we need to make it accessible for people to use.

This new work for News Mixer is being done by the Gazette and me (Ryan Mark). I’ll be writing more about the progress on my blog: http://ryan-mark.com and on twitter: http://twitter.com/ryanmark. Send me your thoughts.

In fall of 2008, Team Crunchberry- six journalism students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism - partnered with Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to explore the broad idea of building better conversations around news. After four weeks of researching and defining our project, six weeks of designing & developing software, and two weeks polishing & presenting our work, we went live with our final product, News Mixer.

And now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for - how we did it. Now available for download is our final report (80 pages - 2.7MB pdf file), which documents all 12 weeks of our research, design and development processes. We also provide our findings and recommendations for the journalism industry, as well as further development of News Mixer.

You might also be interested in this roundup of reactions to the News Mixer site, written by our professor, Rich Gordon.

This has been a very educational experience for us, and we hope this final report will help educate journalists, media organizations and journalism schools (in addition to bettering conversations around the news!). We would like to extend one last thank you to our partners at the Gazette, our industry experts, our research panel, and of course - you - our readers who helped us develop News Mixer. Thanks!

For your edutainment needs, we present a short how-to video outlining the various commenting structures and navigation schemes of http://newsmixer.us

 
How to use News Mixer from Stuart Tiffen on Vimeo.

After much anticipation, Team Crunchberry is proud to present to you our final product: News Mixer.

Our mission statement: “For busy young adults, News Mixer is the only place to find the news affecting Cedar Rapids that your family, friends, neighbors and coworkers are talking about.”

And why is that, you ask? Because it harnesses the credibility of an established media company, leverages existing online social networks and gives people a constructive way to interact with each other and the news.

The site we have created is a demonstration site.  You can log in now with your Facebook username and password and try it out.  The folks at Gazette Communications want to launch a site based on News Mixer in  2009, and there are already some other people interested in using our open-source software.

Here’s a quick summary of News Mixer:

3 commenting structures to encourage and engage readers to discuss the news.

Questions and Answers: Displayed like annotations in the margin of an article, readers can ask questions or answer others left behind by other contributors to the discussion.

Quips: Displayed as a small talk-bubble in a live feed on the article page, quips are short-form comments styled after Twitter that allow people to leave feedback in a quick, to-the-point form.

Letters to the Editor: For users who really have something to say, they can write a letter to the editor in 250 words or less. Instead of having this commenting form at the bottom of an article, our letters to the editor live on their own page. Letters are highlighted by the editorial staff, and are also featured on our home page, highlighting user feedback for the community.

Facebook Connect

Along with the commenting structures, we have used Facebook Connect to take down the registration barrier from using our Web site. Facebook Connect also allows us to display your friends’ comments on every article.  This allows for transparent discussion, and as a direct result, we hope this will encourage more intelligent discussion.

User profiles

Finally, all users of News Mixer get their own profile page. On News Mixer, users are allowed to follow each other’s activity on the site, and view the activity in their news feed. Along with your own contributions, recent comments from your Facebook friends and News Mixer follow-ees are aggregated and quantified in your user profile, which serves as the nexus for the News Mixer social community.

The home page

The home page of News Mixer weaves news articles together with letters and responses from your social network.  On the top of the page you will see recent comments by people in your social network, and a hot question of the day.  Down the left side you will see news articles and letters posted in reverse chronological order.  And on the right you will see a live feed of the most recent quips.  The idea is to provide a quick snapshot of what’s new and what’s generating conversation, while highlighting the conversations involving your social network.

More to come

We’re sure you have a ton of questions about our processes, suggestions for improvement, and of course, comments about what we did. Many of these questions will be answered soonwhen we release our final report, and a video of our presentation. These materials will be found here at crunchberry.org, and will also be available on our News Mixer Web site.

Stay tuned…

We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. Luckily, we didn’t have to. 

There are many sites out there that let users create profiles—but how many social networks and profiles can one person maintain? We decided not to do what someone else is already doing well, and instead utilize the social networking power that is Facebook, or rather, the ability to relate news to your social network using Facebook Connect.

From the Facebook developers blog: “Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.”

This week I am busy designing a system for how comments a user makes on our site will appear on their Facebook profile. Again, not reinventing the wheel here. The Facebook developers wiki makes it pretty clear what the accepted norms are. 

The system I am designing for The Gazette Online this week is very similar to the entertainment celebrity news and gossip site, The Insider. The Insider was one of the first sites to integrate with the Facebook Connect system. Users can choose to add comments they make on The Insider to their Facebook profile wall feed in either a one line, short or full format. 

The good news is that if Facebook approves our implementation of Facebook Connect, the Gazette would likely be one of the first news sites to use the system. But that is a big IF. Facebook has said Connect will roll out November 30, but it’s anyone’s guess if they will hit that deadline, who they will approve and how it will be decided. All we can do is wait, design, develop and hope that the brains behind Facebook Connect like what they see.

xkcd Webcomic

One of the challenges in managing the Crunchberry project is understanding what the development team spends everyday working on. It’s a fundamental problem anywhere developers and non-developers work together: programming is looked at as a black box, something people avoid if possible. As a small group students we each fill a variety of roles and this makes it even more important to communicate how development time is spent.

On Friday after our end-of-the week meeting, I took a half hour to explain the basic concepts behind how Web servers and databases work and what frameworks like Django are and what they do. I tried to keep the explanation as simple as possible, explaining key concepts like what a server is, what web and database servers are and how they fit together, what the difference is between a programming language and a software framework.

I won’t take time here to explain these thing when others have done a better job.

My brief tutorial was helpful to the team. People asked questions and generally understood some of the basics of what the development team does.

Django and its Model, View, Template methodology is relatively simple to explain on a high level. For those who are not familiar - this methodology breaks out logically separate parts of a web application. Models represent data in the database, Views handle the request from a visitor, and Templates format and display the data. I showed off my development environment and some code, trying to dispel some of the magic by walking everyone through a trail of code a visitor would experience when using the Web site.

Programming has a high learning curve compared to many things, but as tools get better and people spend more time using computer systems, that barrier to entry gets smaller. The walls that have been built around technology people need to be torn down. Developers should be able to explain themselves with little or no jargon to non-developers and non-developers should show an interest in understanding.

Ask questions. Challenge the developers to explain things plainly. This helps developers to better understand the problem, and non-developers better understand the tools and constraints the developer works with.

photo by ashe-villain/flickr

Lately we’ve had all sorts of posts about various bits of industry research that we’ve been doing on sites like MonroeTalks, Salon.com’s letters to the editor model, Plurk and personas, but we haven’t taken the time to actually give an update about where we are in the process of this project.  

Well, here it is folks:  We are in the midst of our fifth development iteration.  We have so far successfully designed, developed and are testing the first of our comment structures - Q&A.  Ryan and Brian, our overworked dev team, made an solid product in minimum time.  

We have also designed our second comment structure - Short Format - and that is being developed during the current iteration and we’ll be testing next week.  

The design team, which consists of Kayla and I, augmented by Josh and Angela is working hard on the Letters to the Editor comment structure, as well as ratings structures to be reverse engineered into Q&A and Short Format, all of which are to be developed next week.  

Through each of the last three iterations we’ve been plumbing the depths of Facebook integration, asking how much is too much, how little is not enough and how should it all look?

Crunchberry Team's very first Iteration Meeting!

We’ve wrapped up our first week of design, research and coding. In keeping with our agile project plans, the development team (Brian and I) will work one week behind the design team (Kayla and Stuart). The design team spent the last week putting together features and mock-ups which the dev team will be building in software this coming week.

Since the design team hasn’t had time to put anything together for last week, the dev team built a simple CMS and put together a proof of concept for Facebook Connect. Using Django and pluggables we were able to whip up a basic dynamic news site, plain-jane comments and account registration in a day. It ain’t much to look at yet, but it will give us a starting point to build from as we get direction from the design team.

Facebook Connect was a bit of a challenge to get working, but it will do everything we would like: sharing stories to people’s pages and giving us a way to connect people to their friends and others through news and discussion. As Brian has blogged - it gives us an interesting way to keep the conversation civil: don’t make a scene, others are watching.

There is a bit of a fly in the ointment: When is Facebook Connect going to launch? And where are all the partners? They’ve gone live with a few partners, but the service was supposed to officially launch mid-October after being pushed back earlier this year. And when they do - will they decide that some feature is not a good idea? Not being able to pull a person’s Facebook friends or push a story to their feed makes our application much less interesting.

We’re going to try find out what the plan is from the horse’s mouth, but it gives us pause - do we keep trucking with Facebook Connect and be one of the cool kids on the block when it launches? Or do we hedge our bets and go some other direction and loose some of the potential Facebook brings?