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

If you’ve checked out the Music channel on Current.com lately, you might have noticed things are looking a little different. Here are some things to take note of on the new page layout:

So what’s up with all these changes?

Current is always evolving and changing, and we’re testing out a new layout for some of our top channel pages. Music is first, but we’ll be tweaking this layout, and will eventually roll it out for all six of Current’s top channels.

Where’s the most popular stories list?

The top five stories from Music are listed on the left — just click the “popular stories” link to see the full list, beginning with number five.

Where do I find all of the new music stories?

Want to see all the music stories submitted to Current Music? No problem! You can find them by clicking on the “new stories” link underneath the top 5 popular stories list.

Are there still featured stories?

Yep! The playlist at the top of the page will still be updated with a combination of community submitted stories and videos from our Current Music special, Embedded.

What’s up with the center column?

Any time we have something special going one, Shana (our online producer for Current Music) will use this space to highlight it. Our Current Music special Embedded has all sorts of great stuff, so you may find full episodes, like Embedded with Mos Def in Japan, or web-only extra content like a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the music team’s time with the Silversun Pickups. We’ll also feature music-related groups, or point to special events like our callout to Make Common’s Day.

Cool. So…um…what’s all this other stuff?

Each channel will get a chance to customize their page with all sorts of delicious content. The Current Music team is highlighting their (somewhat eclectic) taste in music, so why not check out today’s look at the top three songs Jen (Current’s music licensing coordinator) can’t stop listening to.

As always, we want to know what you think! So drop by our Get Satisfaction page and let us know. The new layout will be rolling out on all six of our top channels soon, so stay tuned!
Steph

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.

Hello currenteers! Today we are featuring a guest post by our very own Science channel curator, DeliaTheArtist.

Without further ado, here we go:

Hello Current Family!

DeliaTheArist here, happy to welcome the new assemblage of Current.com curators! By now you’ve seen your section of the Current universe, messed around with featuring articles and told your friends how cool you are- but what’s next? How can you take your Curating to the next level? Here are some Tips and Tricks from me and other curators to help you make the best of your experience!

Something one of our new curators, Nettle, noticed is that the flow of information can be slow at first in your group. People are aware of the homepage topics like “News“ and “Green“, but may not realize there is an Otaku section or a place for their Soccer related info. One way to get more stories into your group is to look around Current.com for already posted stories that relate to your section but haven’t been tagged for it. For example, many articles in the Arts and Style section may also pertain to our new Design or Architecture groups; posts that are found in the popular Movies section may also be appropriate for Pop Culture and Indie Film, bands seen in Music may also fit into Underground Music. You can find out more about tagging right here on the Current.com blog!

You’re tagging up a storm and featuring community member’s stories- but is the community aware that you are doing so? One solution is to respond right onto the thread that you’ve featured the story in your section- however I personally find this method to be just a little cheesy. TravG73, curator of the Random group, has another idea- send a message to the user personally to tell them their story has been featured and you appreciate their contribution. Most likely that person will add you as a connection and continue to add interesting stories to your group!

Can’t think of what to say? Feel free to modify this example for your own purposes:

“Hello! Your story, [STORY NAME HERE] is awesome, and it’s being featured in [YOUR GROUP NAME HERE] today- thank you so much for your great contribution!”

Another aspect of raising awareness for your group is promotion. I know some of you don’t want to hear this, but get on Twitter! You may think Twitter is lame, but the fact of the matter is Twitter is an amazing promotional tool. The main problems people usually have with Twitter stem from the fact that they don’t have many followers or don’t know who to follow- but as a Current.com curator you need not worry about that. There is a well established community of Current Staff, curators and community members already on Twitter, waiting to follow you and help promote your passions!

Since you are a way amazing curator of a Current.com group, you have some leverage that you may not have previously – instead of just posting interesting news, why not WRITE the news too? Ask notable people in your group’s field for interviews, stories and sources and mention that it’s for Current.com! Discovery Science Channel made me their “Geek of the Week” when I told them about my work with the Current.com Science section and I’ve been steadily interviewing people in the Science field after a fellow curator, Mike_Johnston, hooked me up with my first source. Current89 just got the green light to interview a former Congressional Candidate from his state for his US Politics section. Make moves, make news!

I hope these ideas help you make the best out of your new position as a Current.com curator. Current is all about community- your fellow curators are here to help! If you have any questions, comments or collaboration ideas, holler at me on Current or at DeliaTheArtist [at] gmail.com.

– Delia

Thanks DeliaTheArtist! I’m certain that many of our new curators will find these tips useful. Just to add a few extra ones in: aside from Twitter, you can use tools like Facebook, forums, and blogs to make people aware of your channel. Facebook groups is chock full of potential contacts, and it’s very likely that there are forums out there on the Internets dedicated to your topic of interest.

Also, if you do decide to go the Twitter route (why not?), you can also use tools like WeFollow, a Twitter directory that is categorized by topic. Check it out!

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

Hey Currenteers,

Welcome to April! We have some new features to cover, but first I’d like to welcome you to our new digs…say hello to the brand new Current.com Blog! Each one of our new channels and our TV shows will be setting up blogs in the coming weeks. So far Current Music, Current Movies, and Current Comedy are all up and running, but keep an eye on our main Current blogs page for new additions.

Let’s dive right in, shall we?

//  Email verification  //

In our never ending quest to thwart spam on Current, we’ve turned on email verification for newly registered members of the community. Until validated, these new members are not able to contribute items, comment, or vote. Requiring that new community members validate their email address is pretty standard for social sites, and we feel that although it isn’t the sole answer to battling spam, it is certainly a step in the right direction.

Those of you who are already members of the Current community will not be required to validate your email to participate, but I still highly encourage it. We occasionally like to send out swag and inform our community about special ways to contribute to Current, and we can’t do that without a valid email. So, take a minute to update your account preferences and request verification for your email address. Thanks!

//  Channel Curators  //

In one of our recent Town Hall chats I mentioned that the team is working on building group creation functionality into Current.com — which we are calling channels. We’re still a long way away from launching this new feature, but we are making some headway. In the next few weeks we’ll be opening up a set of tools related to our channels project to a handful alpha testers, and we’d like to invite some of you to join in on the test. If you’re interested in testing out our new tools head over to our alpha test page on Get Satisfaction page and put your username on the list. If you don’t make it into the alpha this time around, don’t fret. We will open this up to a wider group of testers in the near future, and we already have a target date for a full release. Stay tuned!

//  Improvements to Search  //

Our search functionality on Current.com has been improved in the last few releases. This time around, we’ve added a new “highlights section” at the top of the search results page. The “highlights section” is used to surface some of our TV show content for certain search queries. For example, someone searching for comedy will now find the latest clips from infoMania in the highlights section. Try it out and let us know what you think.

//  Questions about Channel Staleness  //

We’ve been receiving frequent questions about the staleness of content on the channels, and we totally agree. When we made the switch to our channel structure, we knew it was only a layout change for the time being, and we still have some heavy lifting to do with regards to channel specific algorithms, scoring, freshness, and decay. The good news is, we have a brand new addition to our team, and figuring this out just happens to be on his project to-do list! So, ladies and gentlemen of the Current.com community, I’d like you to meet Gary:

Thanks Gary! We’re all looking forward to some of the coming improvements, but in the meantime if you have suggestions or wish to shoot us feedback, feel free to start a thread on our Get Satisfaction support page, or as always you can shoot us your thoughts at feedback@current.com.

//  Increased File Size for Video Comments  //

If you’ve ever tried uploading a video file as a comment, you’ve probably bumped your head on our 200mb file size limitation. NO MORE! We’ve upped the total file size for video uploads in our comments to a full 1GB. So what are you waiting for, fire up that camera and record some video comments. My suggestion? Upload video reviews for this week’s movie releases for a chance to get on The Rotten Tomatoes Show. Check out Current Movies this Friday for the updated list of eligible films to review via video for the next episode of The Rotten Tomatoes Show!

(Note: this update to file size does not pertain to webcam comments.)

Well, that’s it for this release. As always, let us know what you think!

Mario