On Sunday, we launched our new Community Moderated Comments functionality. How does it work? In the past, comments were automatically posted and there was no recourse for comments that weren’t up the the standards of the community. With the new functionality, all comments are still posted automatically, but now readers are able to rate each others comments “up” or “down”. If too many “down” ratings are posted, the comment will be collapsed and grayed out as an indication of it’s poor ratings. Don’t worry, you can still read it by clicking the “view comment” link. This is for folks who want to read the comments but have the lesser quality content hidden from view. Also, if enough people come in and rate a collapsed comment up, it can regain a normal status. If you want to insure your comment will remain up, make sure to have as many people as possible rate this up. Obviously, the opposite is true for comments you would like to rate “down”. Have fun!
How do we prevent abuse of the rating system? This is accomplished in 2 ways. The first is by maintaining a karma value for the commenter which is based on a number of factors. The higher your karma value, the harder it is for negative ratings to collapse your comment. The second way we limit abuse of the system is to limit how many times you can rate the same comment. Sorry, you can only rate once per comment.
Let us know what you think of this new functionality!
Creating a model location for newstronic.com is essential to getting this idea off the ground. Once this is in place it should become more obvious to potential reader/writers as to how this site can be utilized across the country. Sturbridge Massachusetts is an ideal model location. There are a lot of passionate, well intentioned people in town who are writing in blogs and letters to the editor in the community newspapers. The blogs are great because people have the ability to comment immediately. The newspapers are a little less efficient since there really isn’t a great way to respond except through another letter to the editor. While this way of responding can be effective, there is no guarantee your response will make it into the paper due to limited space. newsotronic.com is an ideal place for residents of Sturbridge and other towns to have there voices heard through both posts and articles. Anyone can be an author and anyone can comment. Click here to get started!
Do you maintain a blog about a town or community? Or, do you have a blog and occasionally write about your town or community? If so, then www.newsotronic.com is a great site to post articles linking to your blog. Our site continues to be tuned to maximize its ability to be picked up in search engines and could be a great way to direct highly relevant traffic to your own site. Anyone can become an author and post articles to the site. However, please make sure the content is appropriate as readers have the ability to remove offensive or inappropriate content.
If you answered yes to any of the previous questions then you should definitely give www.newsotronic.com a try and see if we can have a positive impact on increasing relevant traffic to your blog.
www.newsotronic.com is designed to be one of the premier resources for local news on the web. We have tried to make the site as open as possible and it is really up to the community to decide what goes up on the site. At this point we don’t have editors and we’re hoping they won’t be necessary as this would put a filter on the news which is not in the spirit of what this site is about.
For the professional journalists, citizen journalists and activists in the community, www.newsotronic.com is provides an outstanding set of tools to enable you to report on news in your community as effectively as possible. Our first set of tools provides basic authoring/editing/commenting capabilities as well as traffic reporting to measure the effectiveness of your content. In the planning and implementation stages are tools to enable posting content from mobile devices and photo uploading. We’re constantly adding new features and when possible we will provide a schedule for the availability of these new tools as we continue to progress.
Welcome to www.newsotronic.com - striving to be the best choice for local news
We quietly launched www.newsotronic.com in October and November of this year. This has been the culmination of a 9+ month effort of nights and weekends to create a set of services dedicated to providing the most complete local news resource on the web. Our focus will be on news and only news. Some may refer to the content as “local news”, “community news” or even “hyper local news”. Basically, anyone can become an author and post news articles. The site is self governing and you are in control of getting rid of content that may be deemed as inappropriate or irrelevant.
www.newsotronic.com is designed to allow both sides of a story to be given. If readers feel facts are incorrect or an opinion is not in agreement with their own, then the commenting features will allow the other side of the story to be told. Some may even be motivated to become authors and post their own rebuttal articles.
What is the best feature of the site? You are the media! The site really can’t be accused of having a “media bias” because again, you are the media.
At this point, www.newsotronic.com is completely self funded and will eventually become profitable through the sale of advertising to local businesses. As the site gains traction, we expect to become a highly desirable outlet for local businesses to purchase advertising. Local news is accessible by city/state or zip code and our advertisements will be associated directly to locations to make them incredibly relevant to readers.
To get involved with www.newsotronic.com, please click here to become an author.
