WendyClark.com

Blethen Maine Newspapers’ citizen media system

Posted on Mar 01, 2008 in Web Development
Tagged: CMS, Community

Working with Paul Caiazzo and Brian Becker, I designed the templates and architecture for Blethen Maine Newspapers’ citizen media system. We were the first news organization to provide such a broad range of self-publishing tools to the public. Members began to self-publish content not limited to their own pages, but also aggregated to top-level pages of the sites, including the home page. Sites featuring the citizen media system are true member-driven, hyperlocal sites.

The Citizen Media System expanded on the increasingly-popular commenting system already in place in BMN sites by providing the tools for members to publish not just comments, but also blogs, photo albums and their own forum topics. Member pages collect blog entries, photos and photo albums, questions and comments in paginated, reverse chronology. Member pages also include “widgets” such as favorite members, categories and tag clouds. Top-level pages are largely built from widgets collecting content from all members.

I designed the templates and widgets to use independent site themes, but the same system for publishing and aggregating content. So you’ll see that while the sites share common content types, they are arranged and displayed differently in each site.

Homepage in MainePets.com, MaineBusiness.com, ExploringMaine.com, each with widgets for photos, blogs, comments and more.

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Photos page in ExploringMaine.com, MaineToday.com, MainePets.com

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Blogs page in RaisingMaine.com, MainePets.com, MaineOutdoorJournal.com

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Blog entry page in MainePets.com, MaineBusiness.com, RaisingMaine.com

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Responding to requests from our users, we developed tools to embed a photo album inside a blog post, and to automatically link to the blog entry from that photo album. This allows readers to browse photos and discover a blog entry, or click through photos right in the blog entry itself. Click any image to view full size in a new window.