Social media news and TV – Current.com Blog – Your guide to Current

Hello Current blog readers!  By now most of you are getting used to the new release and the updates to the Current.com submission tool.  There’s a lot of new ways to do things (check Mario’s blog post for a really good overview of the new goods), so today I’m gonna give a quick rundown of what I have hastily named ‘multi-clipping’ (if you have a better name for it please email me at bdorries@current.com).

What is multi-clipping?

Multi-clipping occurs when you to add multiple sources to the description field of your story. Instead of only getting to choose media from one source, you now get to browse all the media from each available source.  All you have to do is copy/paste the URL of your sources (as many as you want) into the bottom of your description text and the submission tool will do the rest.

Why so many sources?

Submitting multiple sources has two (that we’ve discovered so far) really beneficial and distinct applications.

1. Keep us updated. Let’s say a story breaks at 10:00 AM about jellyfish capsizing a Japanese fishing boat. It’s a really awesome story, it gets featured on the homepage and lots of people are commenting on it.  Two hours later at 12:00 PM another source reports that it wasn’t a Jellyfish at all but a Giant Squid – this is when you need to multi-clip.  Instead of going through all the trouble of changing the source article and finding an appropriate image, simply post the URL of the updated story in the description field.  After that just add some text updating your readers about the break in the story – and boom goes the dynamite – we’re up to date.
2. Let us know what you’re thinking (my favorite). Just like before, a jellyfish has capsized a Japanese fishing boat.  This reminds you of an article you read a couple years ago about a killer jellyfish population explosion as well as an article that gave some insight into possible causes and effects of the jellyfish population explosion. It’s time for multi-clipping.  Copy/paste the sources, choose your media and let us know what you’re thinking!

Those are just two possible applications for multi-clipping, if you find any more please let me know about them.  And as always please let us know how it’s going on our Get Satisfaction page.  We’ll have plenty more tips and tricks about the submission tool and other updates coming up in days to come – so check back often!

Thanks,

-Ben

bdorries@current.com

P.S. Here’s a great example of multi-clipping from Current online-producer Andrew Fitzgerald :

http://current.com/items/91327125_honduras-reaches-deal-zelaya-returning-to-power.htm

In part two of our series entitled, “Why did you build that feature?” I’m tackling our URL shortener and the Current Bar. We posted a quick run-through for these features last week, but considering the questions surrounding them it felt right to take a closer look.

“Why make a shortener that is 26 characters when others are much shorter?”

Great question. Our URL shortener is truly designed with one intent in mind: providing a better experience when viewing and sharing Current.com content. While it’s not the shortest shortener around, at 26 characters this is a massive improvement — shaving off 11 characters from the shortest Current.com URL previously available. But shortening is really just half of the feature here. Our shortened URLs combine with our new Current Bar to make browsing, sharing, and discussing content on Current much more enjoyable.

Take this story on Current.com for example, “Last of Africa’s desert elephants ravaged by severe drought.”

Comparison of Current.com shortener and Current Bar use on source stories from Current.com

Originally, when you would click on source URLs, a new window would pop open to load the source article. This still happens, however there are two distinct changes to this flow now — when you click on the source URL (found below the title of the story) or the image of a story on Current.com it will open the original story in a new window/tab along with the Current Bar at the top of the page, and a shortened URL in your browser bar (see below).

That’s right, the original source URL is automatically shortened for you when you click through from Current.com — just in case you decide to share the story with someone else via Facebook or Twitter.

So, why the Current Bar at the top of the page? The Current Bar offers voting buttons, the title and full source link, and buttons to respond to the discussion back on Current.com and to share the story with others via your various social networks.

Note: We’ve received a lot of feedback from our community around the use of voting on Current.com, specifically around the fact that many people in our community tend to vote on items without reading the original source story, OR that they click through to read the full source and forget to vote on the story.

The Current Bar attempts to solve for this problem. Gone are the days of clicking through to read the source only to forget to vote or respond back on Current. Have faith, the Bar is there to help remind you. Plus, it gives you an easy way to jump back into the discussion on Current.com after reading the story for yourself.

As Steph pointed out last week, the shortener can also be used to shorten any URL for any story you happen to find around the web. So for example, if you are reading a great article about how the creators of Delgo are hinting at a lawsuit after watching the trailer for Avatar, you have a few options:

Take the original link:

http://www.movieline.com/2009/08/delgo-creators-hint-at-lawsuit-over-avatar-connection.php

Type in current.com/ between the // (doubleslash) and the www in the original URL, and you get this:

http://current.com/www.movieline.com/2009/08/delgo-creators-hint-at-lawsuit-over-avatar-connection.php

When you browse to this new link you will see our shortener in action, and you’ll end up creating this URL:

http://current.com/1eg6m4c

At this point, the story still hasn’t been submitted to Current.com, so the Current Bar looks a little different:

You can submit it easily by clicking the “Add to Current” button. If you don’t want to add it yourself, you can still use the shortened Current.com URL to share the story with people on other social networks. Who knows, maybe one of your followers or friends will submit it to Current for you.

So what are you waiting for? Try it out for yourself, create and share some shortened Current URLs, and most importantly shoot us some feedback and let us know what you think!

Last week we launched Facebook Connect integration on Current.com, and since the launch we’ve had a number of community members ask for more details around this feature. So, here is a deep dive into how Facebook integration works on Current.com.

One Facebook related question frequently sent our way asks, “Why would I want to connect my Facebook account to my Current account?” There are very good reasons, which I’ll get to in a moment, but first let me share a seemingly-unrelated-yet-equally-frequently-asked-question with you, “How do I get my group featured [in fastest growing groups]?”

Believe it or not, these two questions are interconnected. Fastest growing groups are determined by growth of membership. You grow your group in two significant steps: 1) curate creative content, and 2) get your group and it’s content in front of more people.

Facebook Connect gives you the means to accomplish the second step relatively easy. When you link your Facebook account to your Current account, you’re given an easy way to share your Current submissions and comments with your Facebook connections. Truth be told, Current.com is much smaller than Facebook. So chances are, a good number of your Facebook friends may have never even heard of Current, but might share common interests with you which could result in more members joining your group.

“But isn’t that just spamming your Facebook account with Current content?”

Like anything in life, moderation is key. You won’t likely want to share every single comment you make on one Current.com thread, so we’ve put the option to “post to Facebook” in place when submitting or commenting on Current.com. This way you can easily check, or uncheck, if you feel like you’ve sent too much (or too little) to your Facebook account.

If you take a close look at how items get posted to your Facebook feed, you’ll see that items in groups that you own/moderate will actually promote your group as well (take a look at the way my post from an item in the LOST group appears in my Facebook feed).

“OK, but I don’t care about groups. Don’t own one, don’t want one.”

No worries. We find that many of our community members use Current.com to try and create awareness around a cause, or to tell a story that is otherwise being ignored via other informational outlets. If you find yourself in this category, then Facebook Connect still has something to offer. Connecting your accounts will still give you the opportunity to share stories with a larger group of people connected to you on Facebook.

“OK, sounds good. How do I do it?”

Connecting your accounts is easy, and there are several ways to do it. You can click login and select “Connect with Facebook.” If you choose this route, you’ll be asked to log into Facebook, and then you’ll be given the opportunity to connect to an existing Current.com account.

If you’re already logged in, just edit your profile and click on the “external accounts” tab, then click on “Connect with Facebook.”

You’ll be asked to login to your Facebook account, and afterwards you’ll be taken back to “external accounts” and the tab will now offer some customizable settings.

If you check the box to “Publish my activity on Current.com to my Facebook Stream” the “Publish to Facebook” button (found in the comment and item submission workflows) will be checked by default. When you post comments or items on Current you can always uncheck this box to prevent over-posting to Facebook.

If you check the box next to “Current can send me email through Facebook” you will be able to receive Current activity notifications in your Facebook inbox.

Both of these options will prompt an additional Facebook verifications box.

Once you’ve connected your accounts, you will be free to login to Current via your Facebook login, and you’ll be able to publish your Current.com activity on Facebook.

Try it out, and as always send us feedback!

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably no stranger to RSS. Which means that chances are you’ve come in contact with an RSS reader at some point in time. Choosing the right RSS reader can be difficult, and it’s important to weigh the features, functionality, layout, and design of a reader to make sure it suits your individual needs.

Personally, I’ve never seen the need to go beyond Google Reader. Sure, there are plenty of other options out there, but for some reason Google Reader has always felt like the best solution for me. But in the wake of the rapidly growing social web, my dear Google Reader has left me longing for something…more.

Sure, there’s always been the ability to star and share within the Google eco-system, but to be fair I’ve never put much work into building out my social graph on Google. As I’ve become more entrenched in my use of social media tools, I’ve begun longing for a more open Google Reader. Something a little more social. I mean, I’m a fan of staying in on weeknights and cozying up with a good read, but every so often you want to socialize, right?

Well, the fine folks behind Google Reader have been slowly moving in that direction, and yesterday they unleashed a new release of the popular RSS reader — chock full o’ social goodness. In the release, one new feature allows you to add sites like Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Twitter to the new “send to” drop down menu at the bottom of each RSS feed post. Clicking on one of these sites automatically submits a post using your account on those networks, with a link back to the original source. Cool, right?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re probably asking yourself, “Self, what the %$@# does this have to do with Current.com?” That’s a good question, with a darn good answer. You see, Google didn’t stop with just those seven sites — they also added the ability to add your own site to your “send to” list. It takes a little prep to setup, but you can now add Current to your list and clip stories directly from within Google Reader.

Here’s how:

Open up Google Reader and click on “Settings” in the upper right

Click on the “Send To” tab, and click on the “Create a custom link” button

In the name field, type Current

In the URL field, paste this link: http://current.com/clipper.htm?url=${url}&title=${title}

In the Icon URL field, paste this link: http://i2.current.com/images/current/icons/favicon.ico

Your settings should look like this:

Click save, and you’re all set to start clipping content directly from Google Reader to Current.com.

Select Current from the “send to” dropdown list and you’ll jump right over to the Current.com clipper with the title and URL pre-filled for you automatically. Note: not all feed URLs play nice with our clipper when it comes to images, so you may still need to click “select new media” in the clipper, and pick the appropriate image before you submit.

Sweet, right? But wait, there’s more!

If you’re a member or owner of a group on Current.com, and you’re constantly on the prowl for good content to submit to your group, you can take this customization of Google Reader one step further to send content directly to a group of your choice. All you need is the “group slug,” which can be found in the URL of your group on Current.com. Let’s use the SF&F and Comics group as an example (I’ve highlighted the “group slug” in blue below):

Using that slug, here’s what you need to do:

Open up Google Reader and click on “Settings” in the upper right

Click on the “Send To” tab, and click on the “Create a custom link” button

In the name field, type Current: SF&F and Comics

In the URL field, paste this link: http://current.com/clipper.htm?url=${url}&title=${title}&groupSlug=sf-f-and-comics

In the Icon URL field, paste this link: http://i2.current.com/images/current/icons/favicon.ico

Your settings should look like this:

And now when you use your “send to” dropdown, you’ll have multiple options to choose from to submit to Current. Woot! Submit direct to your groups! You can set up as many custom links as you like, and point to any group you are a member of (or own) as long as you pull the correct group slug. So, you could literally trick your Google Reader out to point to any group you are actively participating in. Talk about a time saver!

For those interested, here is the story I clipped about a campaign against the use of the word “gay” in gaming culture, as seen in one of the screenshots above. Pretty interesting, so take a look.

So, now with a little setup time, your Google Reader could become the best clipping tool in your Current.com arsenal. Thanks, Google!

Seriously? I’ve been thinking about online connections lately, and it’s interesting to realize that I have different methodologies when it comes to connections on various sites.

For example, Twitter is a far more open community. I follow people on Twitter based on interest, not real world ties or relationships. Sure, I follow people I interact with offline on a regular basis: co-workers, family, and friends. But the bulk of the people I follow on Twitter fall into a pool I like to call “people I find interesting.” They say intelligent things, pass interesting links, and entertain in 140 characters.

Facebook is an entirely different story altogether. When it comes to friends on my Facebook profile, I opt for personal relationships over random encounters. I’ve made a few exceptions here and there, but for the most part I try to keep Facebook a little more personal than public.

Over on flickr, I prefer a mix between the two approaches, specifically because I can control the privacy settings on each and every piece of my content. Family and friends get to see all of my photos, whereas random connections only get the filtered “public” view. It’s my choice.

When it comes to Current, our connections work a little differently. We’ve received suggestions for improvements, and are always open to more. But it does seem fitting to go over some of the ways connections work on Current, what they allow you to do, and how they influence the flow of content on the site.

While the debate over the preferred way to consume content on Current has largely wavered between the “I prefer the homepage” and the “I prefer my group” camps, there is a third, oft-overlooked, “dark horse” candidate in the mix — My Current.

My Current is a connection-based customizable experience, if you think of connections on Current in the same way I do. You see, I look at Current connections as feeds, a quick way to influence what type of content shows up in My Current. If my contacts are all voting or commenting on one story, I know I’ll need to check that story out. If someone continuously posts or votes on stories I don’t care to see, I can remove them from my connections and keep My Current feed streamlined.

This is just one way to think about connections on Current. What about you? How do you manage your connections here? I’m interested to hear what you think, so leave a comment.

Related:

• Connect with me on Current
• Follow us on Twitter
• Friend us on Facebook
• Check out Current TV photos on Flickr

House on Fire by dvs on flickr.com

Here’s the situation. You come home from a nice night out only to find that your next door neighbor’s home, and everything in it, is on fire. This isn’t just a tiny fire, this is a full blown blaze. So, what do you do?

You could:

1. Rush inside in an attempt to put out the fire, or save anyone who might happen to be trapped inside.

2. Take the “who cares as long as it’s not me” approach, ignore the flames, and settle into bed for the evening.

3. Call 911 and report the fire to the fire department.

Let’s consider these options.

Choice #1: While altruistic and noble, puts you at great risk. You’re not equipped with fire retardant gear, and you could easily find yourself sucked into the blaze, injured, or even blamed for having something to do with the incident.

Choice #2: This is obviously the selfish route. No one would blame you for wanting to avoid risk, but option #3 is really not that difficult to do, so why not lend a helping hand?

Choice #3: Let’s face it, you share a community space with your neighbors. A burned up house will only drive down the value of your own home, so you’re somewhat invested in taking some action. The fire fighters are only human, so they can’t patrol every cul du sac looking for imminent fire hazards. Reporting a fire is a really easy way to help others out without putting yourself at risk.

Obviously this is a hypothetical situation, but it definitely relates to some of the issues that arise in online communities such as our own here at Current.com. Our site is designed to facilitate discussions. We welcome all points of view, and we encourage debate.

Wherever debate exists, differences of opinions are sure to crop up, and when those rear their heads, things can easily spiral from debate into attacks in a very timely fashion.

As a member of our community, we ask that you avoid taking option #1 wherever possible — no matter how heated an attack on you or your connections may be. If you step in and attempt to put out the fire yourself, there is a good chance that you might find yourself surrounded by flames, or resorting to actions that are in violation of our community guidelines.

We also ask that you refrain from taking choice #2 as well. We’re all in this together, so please contribute to making Current a better place for everyone to debate and discuss.

As a community member, please take a look at our newly refined community guidelines, and help out by reporting any potential fires you happen upon while participating on Current.com.

Sending a flag to the online community team is not a negative thing, it’s a good thing. It helps us keep abreast of some of the things going on within the community. We do our best to be everywhere at once, but even with our internal tools this isn’t always possible. So we enlist your help. If you’re not sure, flag it. You may find that what you report is not actually a violation of our community guidelines, but it is still helpful and we appreciate it.

Also, reporting a flag doesn’t give you the right to attack someone on the site. Just report it and let us take a look. We have a 24 hour response window, so you should get feedback on your flag in a relatively short amount of time.

Similarly, electing not to flag comments doesn’t give you license to respond in suit. You may not be responsible for the fire down the block, but that doesn’t mean you get to set fire to your next door neighbor’s house because the one down the block is on fire.

Thanks!

Earlier this week I posted about how featuring content works here on current.com, and it resulted in a series of responses that made it clear that we had some more explaining to do. metalcookiesxy70 and Ricky84 both asked a series of very valuable questions that simply could not go unanswered. I’ve posted responses to their questions, but thought that a broader blog post highlighting these concerns was in order. After all, if two people are asking, there must be many more of you out there with similar concerns, inquiries, or just general bewilderment. So, here are their questions, along with my answers.

First up, metalcookiesxy70:

metalcookiesxy70: “User-created content does not go on Tv anymore, and most users are  saddened by so…”

Mario: we’re sad too, but it isn’t gone for good. as mentioned in several other posts, we had to pull the “community submissions on TV” piece of the Current News concept. The reason this was pulled was not because we no longer wanted to support it, but rather we wanted to do more with it but the system needed refinement. Our goal is to have popular community news headlines from all 8 homepage channels appear on TV. admittedly, it’s taking us much longer than we’d hoped, but soon the content voted up on the popular list of each channel will make it to TV. This means, MORE of your guys’ content on TV…we just need to reach that finish line.

metalcookiesxy70: “Staff usually pull up most of the stories, and leaving them on “#1″ for a long time, which does not allow more stories come up as rapid as the previous layout..”

Mario: There is a difference between the #1 position and the “featured” positions.  On the homepage, the featured spot for each channel is marked with a “star” icon. ?We editorially feature community submissions in our featured sections, but the numerically ordered popular list is determined entirely by the votes, comments, views, and shares of the community. Note: when content starts getting pulled to TV again, we prefer to highlight the top items from the popular list, not the content staff has chosen to feature. Also, we realize that the line between popular/community-picked” and “featured/staff-picks” is blurred in the present design. We are working on some changes that will hopefully improve this going forward. As for the previous homepage layout vs. the new channel-centric homepage — you’ll see modifications here and there, but ultimately some variation on this format will remain. The homepage now serves as an overview of what is available, for a more focused/rapid experience we hope people will join a channel and engage in that way. In the coming weeks, if you can’t find a channel that interests you, you will be able to create your own channel group and people can join that.

metalcookiesxy70: “Useless(rather pointless to post) stories have came to the top, or stay in one rank(usually around the top 10 stories) for a long time (maybe for several days)”

Mario: This actually relates to one of the reasons we needed to pull down the “get on TV” portion of Current News. We recognized that our community is comprised of people who share varied “news-related” interests that span a broader spectrum, which is why we rolled out our channel structure. However, our algorithm and scoring for items is sitewide, which causes complications when calculating popularity on individual channels. We have a PhD on staff named DrGary who will be working on a vastly improved classifier and channel-based scoring system, but this is pretty involved work. the first step is to find ways to classify and organize all of the content in the current.com eco-system. You can see some of the groundwork he’s covered on our sitemap. The sitemap updates frequently, so if you ever want to take a look at this click on the “sitemap” link in the footer of any page.

metalcookiesxy70: “Newer stories would usually be much more harder to reach to the top, than it was in the previous layout….”

Mario: Have you tried voting on new stories in a channel? Voting and sharing is actually quite effective in raising an item’s popularity. Also, voting old/stale content down is a huge part of helping clear out the old. Note: “why is this still popular” comments posted on old items only increases their popularity. If something is old, hit the red vote button and alert some like-minded friends to do the same.

Next up, Ricky84:

Ricky84: “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out current has changed its game plan. So what’s the new niche current.com is trying to fill? Is current.com first and foremost a place to show case current.tv’s various interests or tv shows?”

Mario: Our game plan hasn’t changed at all, but our approach has shifted slightly. We’re a TV station and a social media website, so we need to be able to serve both of those concepts on either platform (TV or web). Our goal is that current.com becomes a place where groups can be created to help inform others about issues and causes ranging from the socially aware to the frivolous. Our TV shows will all be groups on the site as well, meaning you can join the official infoMania group, start an infoMania reviewers group, or create the “I <3 Conor” group. Or, you could go the other route and start up the “Public Health Care Awareness” group. It’s entirely up to you.

Fundamentally, we realized that in order to achieve some of our loftier goals, we needed to be able to give you guys (our community) more tools to create and curate content on your own. So, by rolling out groups and our curation tools you will all be able to do more with the content you and your connections submit to current.com. Additionally, all of this will roll up to our top-level homepage channels, making those much more rich and interesting than they are right now, and then eventually the most popular content in the top-level channels will appear on TV in regular bumps.

Ricky84: “Beyond that is current.com going to play host to various lifestyles or political groups through its system of channels? If that’s the case who creates the channels, viewers or staffers?”

Mario: Right now, because it’s still in alpha, staff has to manually create the channel group on our end. However, the individuals who are curating channels right now responded to our call for interested testers. They weren’t handpicked, and they selected the channels they are curating. It didn’t make sense to include some of the more hot-button topics in our alpha test, but once launched the door will be wide open. In early July you will find a “start a group” button in the green navigation bar on the homepage which will walk you through the process of setting one up a group of your own.

Ricky84: “Lastly does the voting system have a place in current if the site takes on a feudal system of curators, featured submitters and commenter’s?”

Mario: Voting will always factor in because it relates to how content trends in popularity on current.com. Content submitted to a group will rise and fall based on popularity, same as always. group moderators will be able to “feature” content in their individual groups, but that won’t deter a story from rising to the homepage and eventually TV via one of our homepage channels.

And now it’s your turn. Do you have questions about some of the design or functionality changes over on Current.com? Ask them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to clear things up. Do you have feedback or suggestions? Our Get Satisfaction page is open and welcome to your insight.

Thanks for reading.

Hello Current.com’ers!

We occasionally receive questions asking us how stories get picked for featuring on the homepage, or how one story made it to the homepage over another. So in an effort to clear things up, I thought I’d run through some of the sections of Current.com and layout some details regarding our featuring processes.

First, it’s important to note that staff is a part of the Current.com community — always has, and always will be. Contributions from our community help shape the content we program and feature, and there are sections of Current.com dedicated to showing the top community stories as submitted, voted on, and commented on by our community. But in addition to these community curated sections, there are also areas that are reserved specifically for staff to use to program featured content — both community submitted and editorialized by our online producer team.

Current Stories

This section is on the homepage, and it is refreshed occasionally with topical content submitted by the Current community.

We focus primarily on community contributions, and we try to make sure that the stories featured here are timely, contextually relevant, and that they are not duplicate posts. People who submit trending stories before anyone else on Current tend to wind up featured, and this has nothing to do with preferential treatment. When you notice that your post was not featured, check to see if it is too similar to a previously submitted story by doing a search on keywords and sorting by “newest.”

Homepage Channels

Each channel on the homepage has two sections:

Featured: this is noted by the “star” image and the stories in this section are picked by the online producer for the channel. They can be either community posts or a staff submission (usually a callout for webcams, comments, or a blog post pointing people to a new feature, tool, or other notable piece of original content).  Each one of our online channels on the homepage has a corresponding online producer who acts as a host and moderator for that channel. They pick the story featured in this spot, and it corresponds with the first story featured on the channel homepage. The story picked for this spot can be a relatively new submission, or a popular trend.

Community picks: this is noted by the “#1” and “#2” symbols, and the stories placed in these sections are the top two most popular stories as determined by the Current.com community on that channel. These are determined strictly based on popularity alone — a result of votes, views, comments, and shares on the submitted story.

Channel Homepages

The channel homepages have a featured section (we call it the playlist) and a popular ranking section.

Stories for the featured section are picked by the online producer, and the first story is the same story that is featured on the homepage in the channel featured section (see above).

The popular ranking section is all determined by community activity, and the top 2 stories are the ones “picked” to feature in the “community picks” section of the homepage channel module. Our online producers also write blog posts that get featured and highlighted on our site in various places.

To clear up one fundamental misunderstanding: we have some staff members whose sole job is to produce video content for airing on Current TV. These pieces range from shows like infoMania and SuperNews! to Current News recaps like the following video recap of the Neda story from Iran [WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES].

The way we represent these pieces of content on Current.com is via their staff profile, which we clearly mark with a green staff badge. This isn’t showing preference, it’s simply calling out when and where we contribute to the site.

I hope this helps clarify things. Please understand, we realize that some of this can be confusing (and in turn frustrating), so we have been discussing some design changes that could help call these distinguishing sections out better in the future. In addition, I’ll be working on a series of “meet the online producer” and “meet the online community team” posts to help get you guys better acquainted with some of the names and faces you see around the site.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please post a comment below or feel free to submit them to our Current.com feedback threads on Get Satisfaction.

Most of you have probably noticed–and used–the option to share an item from Current with a friend. But before you click send, there are a couple of things to consider.

Think about who you’re sending to

We’re all passionate about things, and of course we want to share that passion. But it’s a good idea to think about who you’re sharing with. Sending an email to all of your connections and your entire address book (including people you’ve only ever emailed once in your life) isn’t effective, and is really only likely to get your emails blocked in the future. I’m sure your dentist is quite fond of you, but does he really need to get an email every time  you add something to Current? (Unless you’re talking about teeth.)

Sharing is intended to let people know about thinks you think they’ll be interested in, so take a few minutes to figure out who really is going to be into this. If someone is totally interested in politics, they might not be as interested in getting a link to that post about the really cool knit R2D2 hat you found and vice versa. And if you don’t recognize the email address in your address book, but you think it was maybe the guy you bought a couch from off of Craigslist….you might want to leave that one off the list.

Make sure you’re formatting your list correctly

As Mario mentioned in a previous blog post, we’ve truncated the list of connections to 100 when sharing. Since this change was made, a number of people have mentioned copying and pasting a list of connections and  email addresses as a potential solution. If you have a list of people you share stories with frequently, it’s important to make sure that you’re listing usernames or email addresses only, and that you’re separating them with commas. Using dashes, semicolons, periods, or emails in quotes will not work.

For example, this list will send:

fakeuser, notarealperson, notarealaddress@email.com, anotherperson@email.com

But this one won’t be recognized:

fakeuser. notarealperson; “notarealaddress@email.com” “Another Person”<anotherperson@email.com>

Consider breaking up your list

Okay, so you’ve got a lot of people who are really, really passionate about the same things you are, and you’ve gone over your list formatting with a fine-tooth comb. Great! Now it’s time to break them up…

No, I’m not talking about creating some sort of massive flame-war implosion to narrow down your list. Don’t be silly.

Here’s the deal: the more people on your list, the longer it takes to share an item, and the greater the chance that something will go wrong and cause the whole thing to fail. So if you’ve got a lot of people (say, more than a couple hundred), you might want to consider breaking the list up into a couple of segments. Not only will those process much more quickly, if you do have a formatting mistake somewhere, it will only affect a portion of the people you’re trying to share the story with and not the whole group.

So, you’ve got the sharing down–but you keep getting these emails about stories from someone you don’t know about things you don’t care about. What to do next?

Talk to them!

Amazingly simple, I know, but the first thing you might want to do is send them a quick message saying that you appreciate the thought, but you really aren’t intereted in recycling/cute cat videos/amigurmi and would they please refrain from sharing with you. The key here is nice–odds are, they really do think you’ll be interested, and aren’t trying to be annoying so there’s no need to go all crazy.

(Tip: if the person sharing random stuff with you happens to be related to you in any way, I recommend just letting it go. I love the joke forwards, Mom, really!)

Block them

Okay, so talking didn’t work. You’re still getting an inbox full of emails you aren’t interested in, and you’ve been soundly ignored or on the receiving end of a snarky message. Now what?

Well, you can always block someone. If someone shares a story with you, you’ll see a link at the bottom that says ” To block this community member from sharing items with you, click here.” Just click the link and you won’t recieve any more shares from that person. It’s that easy!

Oops! I blocked too soon..

Well, your inbox is devoid of links that you might like, and now you suddenly find that you miss those daily updates. Or, you realized that the random person you blocked is actually your sister-in-law and you’re on the verge of igniting a family feud that makes the Hatfields and the McCoys look tame. Don’t worry, blocking isn’t forever.

Just go to edit your profile, and click on the connections tab. You’ll be able to unblock anyone if you’ve had second thoughts.

And that’s it! Everything you need to know about sharing and blocking on Current!

–Steph (more…)

So, you’ve found a great story and you’re ready to post it to Current–but how will people find it? There are lots of ways to make it easier to find a story, but the most important one is adding topic tags — especially if you wish to make to the homepage of Current.com.

Adding tags to a story is not just a great way to get it noticed, tags place your story into channels on Current.com. In addition, tags help determine what surfaces when people search for items on Current. But keep in mind, adding too many tags could run the risk of becoming spammy and non-relevant tags will be removed.

For example, say I were to clip this tutorial on making tulle blossoms. Since it’s a tutorial, I’ll tag it with DIY.

But that’s just one tag–and having only one tag limits the number of places that this will appear on Current. It also won’t show up on any of the  homepage channels. So, I’ll add a few more.

But wait–that’s way too many! I happen to think these blossoms are pretty cute, but they aren’t news–or movies, or music, or comedy, or green.  Aside from looking suspiciously like spam, adding too many tags can hurt a story’s popularity, since someone looking for news would probably red vote this just because it doesn’t belong.

Aha–now these tag are just right.  All of these tags are relevant, so there’s a better chance that people will find this story but it’s not lurking in places that it doesn’t really belong.

As you can see, adding tags to your item is a great way to help people find it, or help that item to the homepage, but overtagging can backfire. If we see stories popping up in unrelated categories, we will remove those tags, and excessive over-tagging can be considered spam, which is against our community guidelines, so it’s a good idea to take a couple of minutes to think about what tags really fit!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this first Current 101 guide. Next up, I’ll be talking about homepage channels, so stay tuned!

~Steph