We’ve Gone Mobile! – New Features & Site Improvements

We made changes to the site this week to bring you more mobility, flexibility, and enhancements that optimize your reports for search engines and provide a richer experience for your readers. We truly appreciate the great feedback we receive from our user community and the Allvoices team responds by delivering new features that help make your experiences on Allvoices most productive and enjoyable and enable you to expand your visibility and global reach.

Here are just a few highlights of the exciting new improvements we’ve just made:

• Mobile: We have optimized the way you can access Allvoices from your mobile devices, simplifying your ability to navigate by top stories and subject categories and making your news easy to read while you’re on the go.
• Suggested Tags: Now when you Report Your News, the Allvoices system will “automagically” suggest relevant keyword tags that you can select to better increase the chances of your reports coming up in search results on the AV site and on Google and other search engines.
• Want to add a live Twitter stream to your report?  No problem!  You can now add a live stream of related tweets by using the “Add Live Twitter Stream” button on your report page.  Simply add terms related to your report and we will show you and your readers the latest Tweets containing that term in real-time.
• Save Reports as Drafts: Our users asked for this feature and its here! Now when you Report Your News you can choose to save your report as a draft by using the “Save as Draft” button. Return to the Drafts tab in your user profile page at any time to complete and post the reports you previously saved as drafts.

You are always welcomed to contact us at support@allvoices.com with your great suggestions and you can look forward to seeing more and more site improvements ahead!

Thanks,

Sanjay Sood
CTO, Allvoices

Riddle: When are Journalists Citizens?

Answer: Never, if you work for The Washington Post.

The Washington Post unveiled guidelines today restricting its newsroom staff from sharing via social networks their opinions on just. about. anything.  The “Newsroom Guidelines for Use of Facebook, Twitter and Other Online Social Networks” are a virtual radio silence order for anyone in the Post’s newsroom who also participate on the web’s social properties.

Just the facts, please...as you see, hear or speak them

paidContent.org has the full text of the guidelines (with a hat tip to TechCrunch).  Among some activities verboten by the Post if you write for the paper:

Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything—including photographs or video—that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility. This same caution should be used when joining, following or friending any person or organization online.  Post journalists should not be involved in any social networks related to advocacy or a special interest regarding topics they cover, unless specifically permitted by a supervising editor for reporting and so long as other standards of transparency are maintained while doing any such reporting.

In fact, All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens (direct from the Post’s text).  So, Post journalists never really get to just be citizens.  They can’t have an opinion, or if they do, they can’t share it with anyone.

It’s easy to understand why the paper is going to such lengths to protect the integrity of its content.  It’s ombudsman, in a blog post to the paper’s readership, is refreshingly frank in his explanation that the paper has been fighting a perception problem: “Many readers already view The Post with suspicion and believe that the personal views of its reporters and editors influence the coverage.”

Well of course they do.  The Post’s reporters and editors (in fact, every newspaper’s reporters and editors) are paid to decide for their readers what is and isn’t news; what gets covered, and what doesn’t get ink.  How are those decisions made?  Personal opinion.  The opinions of reporters and editors are used to determine what is and isn’t newsworthy, and opinions are always influenced by personal filters, whether they’re cultural, political or environmental.  So there is always some element of bias at work in determining a newspaper’s content.  Yes, “professional” editors and reporters are good at shutting out their slant, but they can’t completely neutralize themselves.

Another contradiction in the Post’s guidelines: how they can expect their news staff to stop having authentic, human conversations with other connections on the web especially if, on the flip side of this no opinion order, the Post recognizes the importance of social properties for news gathering.  It’s difficult to see how the two can co-exist with one another.  The Post can’t expect its people to make connections for the purpose of gathering information, without giving up a little of themselves.  That’s just not how the web works.

Allvoices offers an unfiltered platform which embraces multiple points of view.  In fact, the more “angles” exposed around a particular story, the more information that story’s readers have with which to formulate their own opinion about the content.  There’s no one editorial source making decisions for readers.

It’s a new model for news which understands people are social beings.  No matter how good an editor is at determining what is and isn’t news, something influences those decisions.  Reporters from any outlet looking for a place to write without fear of being exposed should take a look at Allvoices’ incentive program, which allows anyone to register and write under their own or a screen name, with full privacy protection.

Exciting New Allvoices Features Released!

Although I haven’t posted development updates recently, the Allvoices’ team has been hard at work improving performance and adding features that our amazing community has been asking for.  Here are just a few of the new features rolled out over the past few weeks:

• New Categories:  We’ve added a few more categories (Green, Health, and Travel), based on your requests
• Tweet Widget:  You’ll notice that many of our pages have a real-time stream of Tweets related to the theme of the page!
• Related Tags:  You will now see related tags to help you find more interesting new content
• Re-hauled Notification:  You now have more control over what type of notification emails Allvoices sends to you.  Check out your notification settings under “Edit profile”.
• Better Spam Detection:  We have implemented a new spam filter to prevent spam comments from being posted on the site
• Report Credibility:  We’ve improved the algorithm and added better messaging. Visit http://www.allvoices.com/help/report_credibilty for more information!
• Better Performance:  The entire team has been working tirelessly to bring you the best and fastest citizen reporting experience on the Web.
• Stay Logged in:  Now you can stay logged into Allvoices.  Simply check “Keep me logged in” and you are all set!

We are working on another major release that will go out before the month’s end.  It will have lots of cool new features aimed at fostering our growing global community.

As always, feel free to drop us an e-mail (support@allvoices.com) and let us know what you think!

Thank you,

Sanjay Sood
CTO
Allvoices, Inc.

Allvoices Performance Issue Resolved

Some of you may have experienced some slow performance over the past week or so.  We’ve tracked down the issue and resolved it this morning.  The site is much happier and your experience will be much improved.  With over 2.7M visitors last month, we’re working hard to make sure that the site is fast and responsive for our growing global audience.

Feel free to drop us an email (support@allvoices.com) to let us know how things are working out for you.

The Allvoices Team

New Features Released!

The development team here at Allvoices released an exciting and major update to the site last week!  We’ve all been working very hard to provide great new features aimed at helping our users connect to their content and to Allvoices’ contributors and other communities.  The major new features include:

• Twitter Integration:  You can now connect your Allvoices profile to your Twitter account.  Every time you create a report, we’ll automatically tweet it for you.  Check out your profile page to get started.
• Contact Importing:  New users can invite their email contacts to join Allvoices.  This functionality will be available to our existing users in the coming weeks.
• Global Reach:  You can now see a country-by-country breakdown of who is viewing your content.  Simply place your cursor over the Reach label (to the right of page views) on anyone’s profile page, and you will see the top countries that have been viewing the user’s content.
• New Incentive Program:  On April 30, 2009 we launch a new incentive program.  Details can be found on the Incentive Program page.
• New Search Page Design:  The search result page has been redesigned to make it even easier to find the reports, people, and users that matter to you!

Feel free to email questions, issues or feedback to support@allvoices.com.

Thank you,
Sanjay Sood
CTO
Allvoices, Inc.

Allvoices Provides Citizen Journalist with a Global Incentive to Showcase Their Work, Make Money

New Model for User-generated Content Features Aggressive Compensation for Contributors and Hyper-targeted Opportunities for Advertisers

SAN FRANCISCO — May 6, 2009 — Allvoices, Inc. (www.allvoices.com), the first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere, launched a new incentive program and site enhancements designed to reward excellence in citizen journalism with a unique model for consumer-generated media.  Built on the success of the company’s first program, Excellence in Citizen Journalism, the Build Your Allvoices Brand initiative rewards contributors from around the globe with cash and creates the first platform where news consumers, citizen journalists and advertisers engage around high-quality user-generated content. 

Along with the new incentive for citizen journalists to develop their personal brand, Allvoices has added features to help contributors quickly build a large audience.  Starting today, registered contributors’ posts to Twitter will update in real time on their Allvoices profile pages, and contributors’ stories published on Allvoices will automatically be posted to their Twitter accounts.  An opt-in email feature has also been launched to send contributors’ published articles to their email contact lists.  This combination of features and incentive are just part of an exciting new model for citizen journalism which helps advertisers and contributors make money through the development of:

Individual Brands (Persona) – Using today’s technology, journalist brands don’t need to be anchored at traditional media firms.  Quality and originality does matter, and Allvoices provides the platform for contributors to showcase their unique talents.  Through the power of the platform, each individual brand attracts a different mix of audience, fans and even advertisers.  Premium advertisers will support premium brands, and Allvoices ensures the right advertisers are placed next to the brands they would support.  This pairing is enabled through an algorithm in the system which ranks report authenticity and contributor credibility.

Tools to Build Brand – Allvoices is a unique platform for sharing news and opinion.  It provides instant exposure, credibility, engagement and an unprecedented opportunity to build an audience.  Contributors can build either a micro- or mega-community with which to engage on the site by utilizing all the site features.  The contributor level and rate at which they are paid is determined by their ability to generate quality content, effectively engage on the site and extend their reach to a global audience.  Contributor reach is measured right on their profile pages, details their level of influence by country and is viewed by mousing over the small globe labeled “reach” under their contributor profile picture. 

An Innovative Approach – Allvoices is the first participatory journalism site to bring readers, contributors and advertisers together in a true consumer generated media environment.  Contributors get paid based on the strength of the brand they build; advertisers benefit from a true Return of Engagement with readers and contributors in niche or broad categories, and the model scales to meet any level of content or traffic demands. 

Citizens, aspiring journalists, writers, bloggers, students, photographers and videographers from around the world are encouraged to participate in the cash incentive program which started on May 1, 2009 and ends on December 31, 2009.  Contributors will be rewarded based on the quality of their submissions, response from the community and strength of their brand, and are ranked in the following three categories:

Read the full release

Allvoices to Adapt Twitter’s Method to Gather Global News

As Twitter ascends to the stratosphere as the communications channel of choice – and there’s no stopping it now - media types can’t be blamed for wishing there were some easier ways to separate out, say, what our dear fellow Twitterers may have had for breakfast, from significant breaking news stories.

Now, there are ways, involving tags and such, but the barrier to entry is so far proving daunting to multi-tasking journalists and bloggers. What I, for one, have been wishing out loud about for a while now would be a Twitter News Channel.

So, along comes Allvoices.com today with an interesting approch to this very issue. You may recall that we profiled Allvoices here a couple of months back. The company is run by a dynamic Pathan-American, Amra Tareen, and its mission is to create a global community for sharing news from anywhere in the world in a multimedia format that dispalys multiple points of view – “free from the traditional editorial oversight and censorship characteristic of global media organizations.”

Today, Allvoices announced that it now can accept a 160-character text news submissions, and algorithmically build a rich media context around that small snippet of information – think of it as a news headline submitted by anybody, anywhere that triggers a multimedia event page supplied by Allvoices.

A particularly intriguing aspect of this service is its global nature. According to the company, around 80 percent of the globe is now covered by SMS access numbers, so users can text in a news submission from almost anywhere.

Read the full article written on BNET by David Weir April 15th, 2009 @ 12:58 pm

Citizen journalism hub Allvoices adds mobile reporting

Citzen journalism hub Allvoices has announced that it is making it “even easier” for its citizen participants to contribute, as they can now send in news via an SMS. The Allvoices system will immediately begin to build a report page around the submission, searching both mainstream media and user-generated content, including picture and video. The system will also send a report code back to the contributor so that more content can be provided to the same report using the code.

“Mobile device technology has reached a point in its evolution where text reports and media are of comparable quality to data delivered via a PC or media shot with dedicated cameras,” explained Allvoices CEO Amra Tareen. She added that she believes “it’s becoming increasingly clear that people want breaking news delivered immediately, and with little editorial bias or interference.” In the US, contributors can send an SMS to ‘VOICES,’ and international participants can find an SMS number on the Allvoices site.

Allvoices gathers contributions from its members and places their reports alongside aggregated stories from mainstream media, distinguishing amateur journalism from professional by colour and title. There is no human editing, rather it is carried out by Allvoices’ proprietary algorithms, which assess reliability of the content sent in. Members, however, can rate or flag content. As newspapers begin to struggle to provide the same level of coverage that they have been for decades, is this a chance for citizen journalists, armed with phones and cameras, to flourish?

Posted on editorsweblog.org by Emma Heald on April 16, 2009 at 8:29 AM

Allvoices Release Update

On Thursday, April 16^th, our development team deployed a minor release to the Allvoices site.  This release contained several minor design updates/fixes.  The main focus of this release was to build the system infrastructure for our exciting new incentive program that will be launched in May 2009.

We are working hard on building the new incentive program from the ground up and are adding new layers for rewarding our users for their contributions.  As always, let us know if you have any questions, issue or feedback.  Email us at support@allvoices.com.

Thank you,
Sanjay Sood
CTO
Allvoices, Inc.

Allvoices Lets Anyone with a Mobile Phone Report News to the Rest of the World

80 Percent of the Globe covered via Allvoices MMS and SMS; Citizen Journalists Break News Using Mobile Devices.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) April 15, 2009 — Allvoices.com, the first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere, has made it even easier for citizen journalists to break news globally with a simple text message. Now anyone can capture news with their mobile device and share their story with the rest of the world by posting it to Allvoices via SMS. For reporting events in the U.S., use short code “VOICES” (864237). Outside of the U.S., go to allvoices.com/mobile, select the country, enter a mobile carrier and phone number and use the SMS number sent to report news as it breaks.

After Allvoices receives a news message, the system sends back a report code, so more content can be contributed to the same report using the code, and the URL of the report page is automatically published on the Allvoices site. Share the report code with friends or other witnesses using the same SMS number or mms(at)allvoices.com to add information, as long as the first word of the contribution consists of @report code for the specific news event. Allvoices understands messages as short as 160 characters (the size of a standard text message) and begins building a report page around the submission. Once a submission is received via text, Allvoices begins an exhaustive search of both the mainstream media and user-generated content to create the same content-rich report pages–including pictures and video–as it does for news contributed via a PC.

“Mobile device technology has reached a point in its evolution where text reports and media are of comparable quality to data delivered via a PC or media shot with dedicated cameras,” said Amra Tareen, CEO, Allvoices. “More than three billion people around the globe carry a mobile device capable of capturing a live event and posting it to the web in real time. That alone has driven the citizen journalism phenomenon to the interest highs we’re witnessing today. It’s become increasingly clear people want breaking news delivered immediately, and with little editorial bias or interference. We specifically designed Allvoices’ mobile content collection capabilities to take advantage of this powerful network of citizen journalists and make it easier than ever for their contributed stories to be seen by a global audience.”

Read the full release