Just got an email from Michael Tippett, one of the founders of NowPublic, the social-media site based in British Columbia. Michael was kind enough to come and be on a panel at the last mesh conference we had in Toronto in May, and had some interesting things to say about “citizen journalism” or open-source reporting or whatever we’re calling it today. NowPublic, which encourages people to upload news reports, photos and video of news events, now has 30,000 contributors in over 130 countries, which is pretty impressive.
Michael wrote to tell me about a new feature they’ve added, called Highlight. In effect, it’s a blog-posting tool very much like the Performancing plugin for Firefox, which brings up a small window at the bottom of your browser when you click on the yellow highlight icon with the letters NP inside it. All the pieces of a blog-publishing tool are there, including a headline field and an edit window and tags, which the Highlighter fills in automatically for you (although you can easily change them).
After you configure your blog — which worked flawlessly with both of my WordPress blogs — you can publish a post to your blog with a single click, and if you want to you can add a NowPublic.com link at the bottom (you don’t have to). The tool also publishes the post automatically to NowPublic, and then gives you a link in the edit window of your browser so that you can find photos and video from NowPublic to add to your post. The site had a wide selection of photos from the recent plane crash in New York, for example — a sample is below.
http://media.nowpublic.com/js/71b1da54d9a849b51fd128312a59b89f.js
One of the interesting things about NowPublic that doesn’t get mentioned a lot is the photo-sharing features that are built in. When you click on a photo, you get a larger version, and when you hover over the photo you get a menu with “ThumbPrint” sharing options (you should be able to see the same menu on the photo above). You can get a high-resolution version if the photographer allows it, and you can also get code to embed the photo in your blog. Very cool.
I think the Highlighter tool is also a great idea — it makes it easy to post things to both your blog and NowPublic at the same time, and to add photos and video. Kudos to Michael and the team.