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

When digging through stories to feature in ‘Current Stories’ on Current.com, I often come across stories that you may have been overshadowed by bigger news items of the day. Take today for example, several stories were bubbling around just under the layer of Marvel/Disney buyout news and updates regarding the LA wildfires. Here are a few of those stories, with a little more context. Hope you enjoy.

The hatred continues

A new study reports that 60% of black and African citizens living in Moscow have been victim to racially motivated physical assaults. Additionally, 80% attested to being verbally assaulted as well.

The report concludes that Africans in Russia “exist in a state of virtual siege” caused by extremely violent acts. They avoid the metro, crowded public places, and stay home during Russian national holidays.

Back in 2007, Christof Putzel of Vanguard chronicled the hatred stemming from neo-Nazi groups in Russia towards outsiders and immigrants in ‘From Russia, With Hate.’ If you haven’t had a chance to see it, please do.

Christof files a Vanguard report, ‘From Russia, With Hate‘

Game winning goal

The words “World Record Holder” may not seem synonymous with Mexico, but today brings news of two instances where the connection is totally warranted. Our first story involves reports of Mexico’s growing obesity problem, an issue being attributed to changing dietary habits and lifestyles across the border.

The epidemic is being met head-on with an anti-obesity campaign aimed at raising awareness, luring people away from fatty foods, and getting them more physically active. Here’s where world records come into play. I’ve seen a lot of awareness campaigns come and go in my day, but never before have I come across one that involves the largest public dance routine to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller.’

But wait, the record-breaking didn’t stop there. In a story that is completely unrelated to obesity issues, yet another world record has been credited to Mexico — this time for the biggest mariachi band in the world.

Kudos, Mexico. You win.

Others worth noting

Wikipedia has decided to color code potentially untrustworthy text on articles in an effort to improve quality and credibility. What’s your take? How much impact does a color coded line of text actually have?

A student left his camera on a mountaintop. As it turns out, those who came across the camera took photos of themselves, and when it was finally returned to him he had a collection of photos to document this experiment in honesty.

Hey Current,

It’s been a whirlwind week inside the halls of Current. I apologize for skipping our fastest growing group posts, but it may come as no surprise that the fastest growing group throughout the course of this entire week has been our Welcome Home, Laura and Euna group.

So, today we return with a new fastest grower…Gaming! Here are the standings:

1. Gaming (4 new members) — curated by Nettle

2. H.E.M.P. (3 new members) — curated by JackHerer

3. Healthcare (3 new members) — curated by asherp

4. Social Media (3 new members) — curated by jdrucker

5. Sustainable Agriculture (2 new members) — curated by JanForGore

So a big congratulations goes out to Nettle for keeping the Gaming group alive. We’re featuring you on the homepage, and Gaming has been added to the Groups homepage.

Going forward, we’re going to keep this list to the top 5 fastest growing groups, so tune in on Monday for a new top 5. Have a great weekend!

Hey Currentians,

It’s time once again to take a look at which groups are growing quickly on Current.com. As I mentioned in a post yesterday, you can get your group featured on both the homepage of Current.com and on the groups homepage by spreading the word and attracting new members to your group!

Each day, between 3-5pm pacific, I take a look at which groups have gained the most new members in the past 24 hours. The group at the top of the pile gets featured prominently, so get out there and let people know about your groups!

Here’s today’s list of the top 10 fastest growing groups on Current.com in the past 24 hours:

1. Make Marijuana Matter (15 new members) — curated by hunzedog

2. DigiDose: Love Technology (9 new members) — curated by brownie4590

3. Indie Film (3 new members) — curated by Pericles_Lewnes

4. H.E.M.P. (3 new members) — curated by JackHerer

5. BIBLE COLLEGE (3 new members) — curated by BIBLECOLLEGE

6. Cyber Security (3 new members) — curated by stopnoise

5. Internet Radio (3 new members) — curated by StreamingRadio

6. Martial Arts (3 new members) — curated by wirehedd

7. Sincerely Sustainable (3 new members) — curated by theauthor

8. Wrecking Ball Radio (3 new members) — curated by wreckingballradio

9. Science (2 new members) — curated by DeliaTheArtist

10. Geek Out Culture (2 new members) — curated by Kid_Amy

So, there you have it. hunzedog did the leg work and took the top spot today. His Make Marijuana Matter group is now being featured on the homepage, and it will be added to the groups playlist as well. Looking at the overall spread of activity, this is still a pretty wide open field. A serious push on Twitter and/or Facebook could be all that you need to get your group featured. Make sure you tell people to join your group, and it helps to let them know why your group will be some awesome to be a part of on a day-to-day basis. BTW — if you’re a fan of LOST, I think I have just the group for you.

I’ll update again tomorrow with a new list and a new top group, so until then, hit up your social networks and promote your groups!

Hey Currentators,

Beginning today, we’re going to start posting a list of the fastest growing community-created groups on Current.com. There are a few good reasons for doing this. First, it gives you an idea of where your group lands in the larger landscape of group-dom here on Current. Second, this list gives you an opportunity to discover new groups that you weren’t even aware existed. Third, getting to the top of this daily list on a regular basis will help get your group featured more prominently on Current.com.

How? We’ll take the group that is the “fastest growing group” of the day and feature it in the Current Stories section on the homepage of Current.com. I’m sure there will be some questions about this, so before anyone cries “conspiracy” or “censorship” let me lay out how this will work.

Fastest growing groups are determined based on daily growth in membership alone. In order to grow your membership base, you’ll need to promote your group, both on Current.com and in your other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. In order to get people to actually join your group, you’ll need to have some interesting (and recent) content in your group. So make sure you’ve got your curator hat on before you start spreading the word about your awesome new group.

Now, to keep us honest we’ll post a list of the fastest growing groups in the past 24 hours on the blog between the hours of 3-5 pacific on a daily basis. The group in the #1 seat gets featured on Current.com’s homepage, as well as in the playlist on the groups homepage as well.

So, without much further ado, here is today’s list of the top 10 fastest growing groups on Current.com in the past 24 hours:

1. DigiDose: Love Technology (10 new members) — curated by brownie4590 — FEATURED!

2. Jon Stewart (8 new members) — curated by hunzedog

3. The Science Club (4 new members) — curated by wirehedd

4. Exposing the Wrongs (4 new members) — curated by stopnoise

5. The Art Gallery (3 new members) — curated by DeliaTheArtist

6. Mathematics (3 new members) — curated by SamtheWizer

7. Universal Health Insurance (3 new members) — curated by lvp

8. Hip Hop Heads (3 new members) — curated by leo9jai

9. SOCA Music (3 new members) — curated by DJTonyTempo

10. DMT (3 new members) — curated by RojoGatto

So, kudos to brownie4590. His DigiDose group is now featured in Current Stories on the homepage, and it will be added to the groups playlist as well. Remember, this is an experiment. We want more and more people to know about our groups functionality, and we figure that we can do this best by calling attention to some of our fastest growing groups. The cool thing is, by growing your groups, you could in turn score the chance to get some added promotion on our homepage.

We’ll try this out for a bit, see how it goes, and if need be make some adjustments. I’ll update the blog again tomorrow with a new top 10 list and a new top group, so until then promote and curate your groups!

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.