Broadcaster

Related Stories

Today a new Broadcaster 1.9 release candidate will be pushed live.  The big news in this RC is related stories.  Often times a breaking news item has several itertive information updates, sometimes over several days.  When small details emerge, it’s logical enough to update your story with that detail, but with large, it’s most times better to author a new article; that’s where related stories kicks in.

Using Related Stories

When editing or adding a new story, you will see a new box in the right sidebar labeled Article Fellowship.  The purpose of this box is two fold.  One is select the story that this is a followup to.  You will shown a list of 50 of the most recent stories before the one you are editing.  The other use is to show you if this story has been been used as a follow-up.  If it has, chances are you want to click on it to edit that story instead.

Changes to the viewer

On stories that have no follow-up, there are no changes.  If the story has a newer story that follows it up, than a small box showing is seen on the top.  If the story is an update to older story, that is shown on the bottom.  Both can happen as well.  Below is example of both.

Follow-ups, what the user sees

You can now tweet about the weather from within broadcaster.  Just like the news articles.  See the below image.

Tweet the weather

Broadcaster now has a way to let you be notified of comments that need to approved or deleted.  It works within Mozilla Firefox on the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms.  Installation of this comment notification feature takes about 10 minutes and then it auto upgrades it’s self form there.

Mac OS X

If you are running Mac OS X, you need to install Growl.  Numerous other applications use Growl and very well may have it install already.  If you don’t, head over to  growl.info and install it, it’s free and open source.

Installing the Firefox Extension

The first step in installation is to install the Firefox addon Jetpack.  It can be installed from addons.mozilla.org.  The current release is for Firefox 3.5.  If you don’t have firefox 3.5, you can upgrade at this time, or select one of the older versions of Jetpack that is for you version of firefox.

Install Jetpack from addons.mozilla.org

Now we jetpack installed, you will need to restart your firefox and the hardest part is over.

Moderate Comments

With jetpack installed, go to the broadcaster admin area and click on comments.  On the very top of your firefox window, a little bar will appear, right under your tabs.  It should look like this.

Installing a jetpack feature

Go ahead and click install in the upper right.

Scary Screen

Now you are going to get a scray looking screen.  It should tell you that you are installing a jetpack feature from an untrusted source.  See below.

Don't worry it's okay

Go ahead and click on auto update this feature and click I know what I am doing, install it.  You should get a jetpack screen saying that it’s installed.

All Done

That was not so bad, right?  Now on the bottom of your firefox window, you should see the following.

Installed Jetpack

It’s the broadcaster logo with a number in the corner.  That number is the number of comments that need to be deleted or approved.  It will update about once a minute.

As of version 1.8.RC4, podcasting is available in broadcaster.   Podcasting is more or less, a RSS feed that allows applications like iTunes to download rich media files and put them on a MP3 player.

Changes

Now in broadcaster admin, instead of the VIDEO tab, you will see the MEDIA tab.  Under this tab is video, ads, and mp3 podcasting.

To make a new podcast, select MEDIA -> PODCASTING -> New Podcast.  You only have two fields to populate, title and the mp3 file.  Your title should be a little blurb about the content of the podcast file.

The main screen in the podcasting section

If you would like to start making use of Broadcaster podcasting, let Sephone know.

Version 1.8.RC2 made it out into the wild today. There are two major changes: Facebook and Recent Stories, as as some minor changes.

Recent Stories
On the article pages, under the video and/or images, there is now a box that is somewhat small that allows scrolling. This stories are just your top 20 published stories.

Facebook
Not everybody has Facebook connect enabled, if you don’t have it enabled, call Sephone and ask for it.  With facebook connect enabled, users can comment via their facebook account, instead of typing in a name/email/website everytime they comment on a story.  This feature also gives users the ability to post their comment back to their facebook wall to let their friends see what they said on your site.  Here are some visual differences, click to enlarge.

What it looks like to use facebook connect for the first time to a user

Posting a new comment with facebook

What the admin area looks like when moderating facebook comments

The way facebook comments look to other users

In broadcaster it used to be that a video ad could only be linked to ’stories’.  Once linked, broadcaster would randomly select on of those videos before every article was viewed.  This was simple and worked reliable, but lacked fine grain control.  Starting in version 1.7.2 of broadcaster, you have more control over that.  Instead of seeing a single check box for stories, you see this.

Show Categories to Select

After Clicking on Show Categories to Select

You can select your broadcaster categories that you would like to have this ad run before.

Questions

What if a category does not have any ads?

This does two things.  It will turn off autoplay for those articles.  Secondly, no ad will be show, it will go straight to the video.

How are these videos selected?

They are all weighted evenly and selected randomly, at least as randomly as computers can generate.

What if I have a video per category for an advertiser?

It’s best to create several ads for them and link to the right category.  In doing this, you should come up with and stick to a convention.

OpenSearch is a way to let web browsers know how to search your website.  Most of you are aware that pretty close to your address bar, there is a box to search google, yahoo, or live.   If your website is setup for opensearch, your users can choose to add your site to opensearch if they choose.

Broadcaster is opensearch aware.

The highlighted Search box means I can add a new search engine

Now I can search my broadcaster site from the browser