The evolution of n0tice to help publishers with user content

The talkaboutlocal team has a long-standing relationship with the Guardian Media Group’s n0tice.com.Quite aside from my involvement as one of the platform’s founders, the rest of the talkaboutlocal team has also been actively engaged in helping to develop it.

And yesterday marked a real milestone in its evolution – a new website, new focus and some major clients on board.

Posting on the n0tice Facebook page, The Guardian’s Matt McAlister explains the changes well.

“You are probably aware that n0tice is the technology behind GuardianWitness, but now we also work with ESPN, The Boston Globe, several UK publishers and more partners who will be announced soon.

“n0tice helps professional publishers turn users into valuable contributors. We know how to do this because we developed n0tice at the Guardian where openness is a core competency.”

On the journey to this point, we’ve also been utilising the platform ourselves and with some smaller independent publishers in our network. We’ve been working through the issues of the n0tice platform deployed at a local level, creating a self-contained space for local pictures and video – User Generated Content (UGC) to use the publishing jargon. This is a counterpoint to Instagram, Flickr etc where a local publisher is always quite clearly in someone else’s UGC space.

Take a look at these local sites to see how the n0tice UGC platform has been deployed:

– on my own site in North Yorkshire at www.richmondnoticeboard.me
– on William’s site in London at http://kingscrossgallery.org.uk
– with John Baron’s site in Leeds at http://stories.theleedsguardian.com
– in Edinburgh with Phyllis Stephen’s website at http://reportage.theedinburghreporter.co.uk

We’re hoping these user-led additions to the hyperlocal sites will lead to greater local engagement and take advantage of what the n0tice.com platform is particularly good at i.e. enabling website publishers to invite audience participation, manage their contributions and even develop new revenue around the experience.