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Congrats to the NowPublic management team on closing their $1.4 million angel round. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor and now a minor investor.) I got some perspective on how hard it is to facilitate and encourage citizen journalism working on Bayosphere last year.

NowPublic‘s come a long way since the first site I saw that they launched at PC Forum 18 months ago. It’s completely different now, with more than 2 million visits/month, and 15,000 reporters posting links, stories, and a ton of video footage. The NowPublic tools for protecting these media assets, managing them, and aggregating it all so others can build real stories is new and different.

I dont’ know of any other news-focused citizen-journalism entity that even comes close to this many participants. And, with the proving of their tools and platform — something of a mix of features found at Digg, Newsvine, a video editing tool, right managment, and things you just haven’t seen–the team is finishing up their first offering for other publishers, their On Demand Reporting system.

But what can you do there?

At NowPublic you can:

• Point people to news and events that are important to you.
• Make the news better by contributing photos, video or audio to any news story.
• Store your footage, share your photos and videos with the world, and protect your intellectual property – all at the same time.
• Get free news footage to use on your blog.

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• My last post suggested trying Skype. This post’s tipping you to what looks to be a not bad FREE $40 VOIP phone with which to use it (or AOL, or Vonage, or any of the others. internet phone services.)
• Check out Vyew, among the coolest of the new wave of web applications. It just works. You can sign on, invite people, and have a conference online. And it’s free. Even for the conference calling part. (Though i’ve also been using Free Conference, you can’t draw a picture, show a map, or go through a document.) Use it to chat while on a conference call…cool for that too.
• And speaking of Myspace, if you want to understand what all that’s about as well as the rest of this social media thing (and a bunch of other things in life I find as i read more and more of her stuff), please check out Dana Boyd who’s writing it and a whole lot more at Berkeley. She’s one of those folks online who are consistently brilliant as in her piece on G/localization. I end up reading her again and again, passing on her pieces, and now sharing with you. And she joins Oprah, author (and friend of mine) Ari (Female Chauvanist Pig) Levy in cheering on Pink’s new CD. it’s political, strong and yo can dance to it.. (Warning: Boyd makes new and possibly difficult things seem obvious, and has more than once made me feel unworthy of blogging, writing, or participating. Typically academics rub me wrong, insisting they know better than those involved. That’s clearly not the case here. While i may be late to loving Oprah (another day), i’ve loved watching Pink com stretch and grow (and make a new feminism her own). And she clarifies what’s likely to be rubbing you the wrong way with the current demonizing conventional wisdom about MySpace.)
  
• And a heads up on cool stuff with two sites I advise. Now Public has added a ton of features with more on the way. They boast a staggering 10,000 contributors globally. (While a bunch of the so called social media sites continue to scrape for postings and participants. It’s the tools and the community and the output that are interesting in this case. Treehugger’s expanded into TV with a bunch of different offerings and the latest spinoff, hugg.com which is hard to explain, but is definitely a trendcollission mashing up digg.com with the green movement and a DIY spin. But it works!

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