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

This week’s product feature release is so big, we had to crack our blog announcement in half just to do it justice. Part II covers RSS feed enhancements, email notification tweaks, and a brand new way to browse recommendations on Current.com items. But first, we tackle  the elusive beast that is the Current.com group:

Way back in May we posted a callout for top secret testers to play around with some curation tools we built in preparation for launching groups. We received a pretty positive response to the test from a little under forty curators, and now the time has come to unleash our new groups functionality for the rest of the Current.com community to enjoy.

Starting now, every single member of our community will be able to create and customize a group on Current.com tailored to their own specific interests. This is a monumental change to the site, and there is a lot to cover. So, here goes.

Start a group!

It’s simple, click the “Start a Group” button in the green navigation bar on Current.com. You’ll need a name, description, and some tags for your group. For example:

Setting tags for your group is essential, because these will be used to recommend Current.com submissions to consider for your group. These recommendations will appear below you group, like this:

The items and submissions listed as potential “quick adds” are determined by two things: the tags you use to define your group, and the tags people use to define their story submissions to Current.com.

So for example, if you’re trying to set up your group to contain up-to-the-minute Nintendo gaming news, you will want to add tags related to video games, gaming, and of course Nintendo. A healthy set of tags for a Nintendo group might include: “Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Nintendo DSi, Nintendo Wii, Super Mario Bros, Shigeru Miyamoto, Video Games, and Gaming.”

Not only will you be able to handpick stories to add to your group, you’ll also be able to curate your group by featuring stories, or removing submissions that don’t truly belong to your group. You can use our curation tools to feature an item, and once it’s been featured you can then use the up/down buttons to position it on the page in the order of your choice. Featured items will have a star icon appear next to them.

If you feel that an item that someone added doesn’t fit with your group, simply check the red X button and it will be removed.

Your default view for your group will be a list view, but you can change it to a playlist template in your groups admin page.

The curation tools for featuring work the same in both templates, so the choice is really up to you. If you prefer the playlist layout, head over to the admin section of your group and select a different template.

Once you’ve finished setting up your group, all you’ll need are members! Share your group with others on Current.com, or reach out into your various social networks like facebook, Twitter, and MySpace to let your contacts know about your group!

Sometimes groups grow quickly, and you may find that you need more than one set of hands manning the ship. Once you’ve built up a following, you can even grant some members moderator status to help curate the group with you. Keep in mind, giving moderator powers to another group member can be easy to do, but it will also give them full access to curating your group. Choose your moderators wisely, and if things get out of hand, you can always revoke this status by using the ban function.

If you happen to find that some of your members get out of line in your group, you can even ban them from your group altogether. This will prevent them from adding content to your group. Remember, if you believe that a member is violating our community guidelines, make sure to flag them after you ban them and our community team will take a look at their profile.

Join a group!

Maybe creating a group is not your speed, but you can still join and participate in a group on Current.com. Who knows, someone might even make you a moderator!

You can find new groups to join on our newly added “Groups” tab — conveniently located in the Current.com header. On the groups page you’ll find some of our featured groups, as well as listings for other groups on Current.com. Browse around, see what you find, and if you don’t see a group that fits your needs that could be an indicator that you should make one yourself!

On every groups page you’ll find a “related groups” section that includes exactly what it sounds like — other groups related to that group. And as if that wasn’t enough, you can also find groups via search on Current.com. Search for keywords that interest you, and potential related groups will appear in the search results.

Contribute to a group!

There are couple different ways to contribute to groups:

1) When you submit a story to Current.com

2) When you read a story on Current.com

When you submit stories, you’ll now find a new “groups” section in the clipper. This section has a dropdown menu that comprises of all the groups you are a member of. Remember, you have to be a member of a group in order to add a story to that group.

A similar drop down menu can be found on Current.com item pages. So, when you read a Current.com story, you can easily access a dropdown menu of all your groups, and select one of them to add that story to.

If you are not a member of a group, you can still help recommend stories to different groups on Current.com with tags. We recommend stories to group moderators based on the tags on individual items, so if you see a story with very few tags, consider adding a few to help it find a new home.

Our team has been working very hard on groups, and we have plans to expand this functionality by make groups more customizable in coming releases. In the meantime, create and join some groups. Play around with the new features, and test out some of the other Easter Eggs we’ve rolled out in this new release.

So that’s it for groups. Steph is following this post up with Part II to our feature release announcement, and she’ll be laying out the latest updates to our RSS feeds, email notifications, and highlighting a brand new way to browse content on item pages. Check that out after the jump.

Otherwise, please keep in mind that your feedback helps us shape things to come, so be sure to take some time to shoot us your thoughts, make some suggestions, and let us know if you see any quirky behavior on the site. You can send us feedback by clicking on the feedback tab on the blog, head directly over to our Get Satisfaction page for groups, or by sending us ol’ fashioned email at feedback [at] current.com.

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.

hey currentians,

i know, i know…it’s been SOOOO long since our last feature release. all jokes aside, the second part of our feature release doubleheader just rolled out, and it introduces a brand new concept to current.com called “bundles.”

Q: what is a bundle?

A: a bundle is a group of stories packaged together based on their relationship to one another. these stories usually come from different sources, but are all related based on keywords and other similarities.

Q: why are you calling these “baby-bundles” then?

A: well, the bundling concept is still in the infancy stage — hence, the use of the word “baby.” we have much, much bigger plans for these once they reach the “adult” stage, but we are not quite there yet in this release. so let’s get into some of the details.

Q: where can i find these baby-bundles?

A: each homepage channel on current.com (news, music, movies, tech, green, gaming, comedy, and art & style) has a new module in the right rail of the channel homepage. this module is titled, “real-time news” and it includes a cloud of trending terms and links to the most recently created bundles for that channel.

Q: how do baby-bundles work?

A: for our first iteration, we’ve deploying a team of current bots (e.g. current_news_bot, current_tech_bot, current_movies_bot, etc.) to scour the web for stories to turn into baby-bundles. these baby-bundles are created specifically for the current.com community to engage with and discuss. baby-bundles are similar to individual items on current.com — you can comment, vote, and share them with others.

Q: what can i do with a baby-bundle?

A: when someone comments and/or votes on a bundle for the first time, the bot associated with the bundle’s channel will place the bundle in that channel’s stream. by voting and commenting, you tell our bots which bundles are interesting enough to place in the channel. so, if you see a bundle in the music section that looks like something the current.com/music community would be interested in, vote and comment! the bundle will automatically be added to the current music channel, where others can vote and comment on it as well.

Q: can i create my own baby-bundles?

A: baby-bundles? no. full-blown “adult” bundles? yes! as i mentioned, this is just the early stages for bundles, but we plan to roll out the ability for our community to bundle stories together when we get closer to releasing the fully matured bundles.

Q: what do the trend links mean?

A: these are terms that we recognize as trending within our bundles creation flow. clicking on these links will take you to the bundles that directly reflect those trends.

so, take our new baby-bundles for a test drive and let us know what you think. we’ll be tweaking the process for bundle creation over the next few weeks, so any feedback you have will be very helpful. you can ask questions or offer suggestions over on our Get Satisfaction page.

in the meantime, here are a few bundles that caught my eye:

• Movies: Orci and Kurtzman talk about deleted Shatner cameo (in the new Star Trek film directed by J.J. Abrams)
  
• Music: Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse, and David Lynch album, Dark Night of the Soul, scrapped
• News: Tamil Tiger rebel leader dead, Sri Lankin state TV reports
• Tech: Wolfram Alpha: The Beginning
• Green: Northern Florida burning more wood to meet renewable energy targets

shoot us feedback, and feel free to share some of your favorite baby-bundles with me,

– mario

Mystery Bug photo by aussiegall on flickr

hey community!

we’ve been receiving reports that some community members are noticing issues when they try to share their stories with others. i thought it would be a good idea to clear up a couple of things, and let those of you who are experiencing this problem know that we are on the case.

first, a while back we noticed some strain on our submission tool, which we like to call “the clipper.” this strain was a direct result of pulling in a posters contacts list for the sharing portion of the clipper, so we revised this flow to only pull in 100 contacts at a time. we realize this isn’t ideal, and we are going to be making improvements to the clipper workflow in the future. for now, this helps reduce the load and keep things running.

second, let’s talk ghosts in the machines. a number of you have reported that when sharing items with some of your contacts, you are finding that those shares never actually reach their intended recipients. typically, this sort of behavior is a result of someone blocking you for oversharing, but for a few we’ve noticed that isn’t actually the case — shares are just not being sent out due to some unknown bug in the system. most cases center around people who copy and paste lists of usernames into the sharing field under the “invite a friend to chime in on this” section. our team is looking into the matter, and trying to get to the bottom of things, so we hope to have this resolved soon.

for now, if you’ve noticed any odd behavior when attempting to share items with people, please head over to our Get Satisfaction thread on sharing and post some details. your experiences could provide the necessary clues needed to get to the bottom of the case.

thanks!
– mario