Featured site: NowPublic.com

NowPublic.com is a Drupal powered site focused on changing the way the news becomes news. Imagine that you are walking down the streets of Manhattan when a trailer drives by with the group U2 jamming away. You use your camera phone to snap a wicked shot of Bono - but where do you send it? To your blog? To your friends? To a bulletin board? But how is anyone who doesn't know you going to find it? Instead, you could email it to news@nowpublic.com and let the world know that there's something cool going on. NowPublic lets you share your good stuff with not only your friends but with the world, while at the same time protecting your rights and giving you full credit. Here's an example of what I mean:

http://www.nowpublic.com/node/4291

As you can see, the Smart Media object allows anyone viewing the photo to contact you directly should they want to purchase or license the full-sized version. You can also put audio and video files into smart media. Here's one of my favorites:

http://www.nowpublic.com/node/5408

Now imagine that you are interested in an event or some other news story but you either can't get there yourself to check it out or you aren't satisfied with the coverage that is being given by Big Media. That is when you go to NowPublic.com and "demand coverage". Specify the location, the time and the event and reporters in the area will be able to respond to your request and provide you with the coverage you really want. Other people viewing the site can second your request for coverage, speaking out with one voice calling out for information.

As a reporter, or photographer, you can find work by looking at what the public is demanding. Search for open assignments by geography, subject or budget and then go out and get the story. Check out the latest assignments here:

http://www.nowpublic.com/developing?filter=assignments

Add something to the queue if you want or cast a few votes.

NowPublic.com is the brainchild of Michael Tippett of BlueHereNow Technologies, Inc in Vancouver. He is a big fan of Drupal. The Drupal
aspects were coded principally by myself, Michael Meyers and Alan Evans. Other contributes include Mike Snelgrove (Flash) and Krishna Kumar Ganesan.

NowPublic.com employs an impressive array of Drupal modules including:
filestore2, fscache, image (old), mailhandler, mailalias, mime_registry, moblog and userposts. In addition, we created six custom modules to handle everything from custom RSS tracking to an entire XML-RPC API for communicating with Flash objects.

The most exciting technical feature of the site is the communication between our Flash objects and the site's servers. As noted above this leverages Drupal's excellent support of XML-RPC. It allows each Smart Media Flash object to be a mini-client to the site. That means anyone looking at our Smart Media on a 3rd party site can register a user with NowPublic.com, log in, post comments, contact the media owner, and most importantly, copy the Smart Media to their own blog by copying and pasting a snippet of JavaScript which the Smart Media provides.

During the entire development time of making this site, Drupal was expected to perform and shine as a rapid development application framework. We needed to show our sponsors on a daily basis that Drupal allowed us to be flexible and quick, and that Drupal didn't get in the way of making a lean and efficient application. It was important that Drupal not lock us in in terms of presentation or work flow. Thankfully, Drupal passed with flying colors!

We still have a lot of work to do at NowPublic.com. We are eagerly looking around and seeing many other modules which may be of interest to us, and our list of planned features and improvements is long.

Please feel free to contact me directly if you have questions about NowPublic.com, or if you would like to help us by offering comments and criticisms.

There is more to read about NowPublic.com here:
http://www.robshouse.net/nowpublic

-Robert Douglass