Announcing the Alpha Release of Social Media Toolkit

[Newscloud]

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

What is it?
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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
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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.

For more information, please visit http://groups.google.com/group/newscloud/web/social-media-toolkit
or http://www.newscloud.org/index.php/Social_media_toolkit