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.

For those who hold their message board comments near and dear to their hearts, IntenseDebate has built an online community centered on its commenting software. An application that can be added to any Web site or blog, IntenseDebate fosters conversation, and builds its community around its users’ comments.

Recently purchased by Automattic (The company who brought us the open source blogging software WordPress), IntenseDebate will now be found much more commonly throughout the blogosphere. And with a larger Web presence, IntenseDebate will look to continue growing its comment-savvy community. So how are they doing it?

As you can see from the image below, with a clean, simple interface, users’ comments are threaded and ratable in a binary “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” style also seen on YouTube. By default, the top rated comments are seen at the top of every post, along with when the thread was last active for relevance. Comments can also be sorted by date and last activity. Also, all threads are collapsible, enabling the reader to separate the wheat from the chaff instead of having to sort through an entire message board to find the morsels of good content.

And if there is a conversation the user wishes to watch, he can do so via his RSS reader. To respond to a previous post, users have the option of continuing the conversation in the thread on the page, or they can respond via email – a unique feature IntenseDebate has implemented.

So how is this building community, you ask? Well, there is a link to the user’s personal profile, complete with picture and reputation points next to every comment he leaves.

Upon clicking on the user’s profile link, their personal thread of most recent comments, a list of users this person is following, recent profile visitors, and links to external social media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as personal blogs and Web sites.

Check out this sample profile:

So I guess after learning about this app, my question to you would be whether or not you think this does a good job of generating community discussion. Would you consider installing IntenseDebate on your blog? Would you register for IntenseDebate so you could comment on another blog? Let us know your thoughts!