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.

We’ve been writing this blog since the project started.  For the first few weeks we wrote about the theory of the project, since that was what we were struggling with – the major decisions of which task to tackle, which features to include, and which to cut.  

Those were the heady days of philosophical discussions about Journalism and Conversations and Democracy and there was much to blog.  

Then came the era of the research, wherein the consumer insights team wrote about their findings, and the industry researchers dug through the host of products already in existence, and the team gleaned many new answers that provided course corrections for the project.  Since then we’ve blogged about some of our industry research discoveries.

The act of blogging served as a catharsis.  It was the cleansing act of articulating the problems we were combating.  It helped us organize, provided objectivity and some of the input we’ve received from comments has been invaluable.

Happy programmers write happy code. by Stuart Tiffen

But after much hand-wringing and painful decisions suddenly, overnight we were in full-on development mode.  Since now our day-to-day grind consists of tackling innumerable design and development obstacles, with some research and now final report and presentation preparation thrown in, such pursuits do not always make for interesting blog posts.

And so, I ask you, our loyal reader(s), what is it that you would like to know about the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma that we call the Crunchberry project?

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?

It’s decided. As Stuart noted one of the super features we are beginning to develop is comment structures. 

This week Stuart and I are designing a question and answer structure for comments. We decided to tackle this structure first because it has come up so often in our class discussions that we had to take a longer look. Whatever we come up with by Friday will then be passed off to Brian and Ryan, our programmers, who will build the system next week.

mikemindel/Flickr

We will likely be designing three additional structures throughout the next few weeks. We have a lot of great, innovative ideas for different comment structures – and that is the problem. An argument could be made for any of these ideas, so what we really need is feedback.

Here are the comment structures up for consideration:

Letters to the Editor (much like the Salon.com model)

Users would write a headline and more formal letter-style comment. Could include an option for editors to highlight the best letters to feature prominently on the website or in the print product. 

claireblang/flickr

Polling

This comment structure is designed for people who don’t have a lot of time. One to three questions at the end of the story, users submit their votes and see results. 

the brownhorse/flickr

Ratings

Quick votes by users. Giving stars, thumbs up/down, or points to comments. The top rated could be displayed prominently. Users could also choose to display only those comments with a rating of 3 stars or higher.

Moderated by user (much like the Slashdot model) 

Users post comments. Other users (or users with special moderating privileges) give points to those comments they deem interesting, intelligent, etc. Users can choose to only display comments with X number of points, or “interesting” ratings. 

Short format (much like Twitter)

Users are only allowed 200 characters to make their comment.

Opinion disappears

In an effort to foster intelligent discussion, not based on opinion rants, this structure makes comments containing unsubstantiated opinion disappear in a shorter amount of time than other comments, such as anything supported by a citation or reference and questions. 

Waffle Whiffer/Flickr

Mad Libs

Users leave comments in this format: “I feel _________ about _________________.” Could feature a drop down menu of choices. 

Annotation/citation/reference/footnote

Allows users to make a comment or site an additional source at a specific point in the article. 

One-click comments

Users click buttons at the end of the story with general statements about how they feel about an article. Examples: “This story frustrates me,” “This article offends me,” “This is awesome,” and “This is well-researched.”

Format 

Allows users to choose the format in which they leave comments. Could include replying via video and/or audio. 

Live chat

Registered users can see other users who are logged into the site and begin a live conversation with them about a particular story. This comment would be visible to the public and displayed on the side of the article. Other users could jump into the conversation at any point. 

We want your comments on every blog post, but we especially NEED your comments on this post. What’s interesting to you? What are your top three? Why? Are there any models/ideas out there that we missed?