Announcing the CommonTimes.org beta: a social bookmarking community for news readers

Today, we’re announcing an early test-release of CommonTimes.org, our newest member site of the CommonMedia family. We hope you’ll give it a try and share it with your friends.

We've also written two how to guides that may be helpful: Ten ways to use CommonTimes and How to add stories to CommonTimes from Bloglines.

What is CommonTimes?

CommonTimes is a social bookmarking site for news readers. Or, in simpler terms, CommonTimes is a news site that publishes stories based on how frequently you choose to bookmark them. The more widely our readers collect certain stories, the more prominently they will appear on our Web site.

If you imagine the mainstream media exists at one extreme of top-down content control where a small group of editors determine what appears in the News, CommonTimes is exactly the opposite – a bottom up news site at which grassroots Web readers determine the top stories by bookmarking them as they browse.

Comparatively, CommonTimes is to news what Del.icio.us and Yahoo’s MyWeb are to Internet bookmarks. Contrary to Google News, a closed, automated system limited to mainstream media stories, CommonTimes is an open community system that accepts content from any news site or blog – and is entirely driven by our readers. For example, while Slashdot and Grist Magazine provide a tightly controlled top-down filter of technology and environmental news that only rarely makes the mainstream media, our sections provide a bottom-up view of stories our readers feel are important from any source which may well integrate stories from the latter.

News it what our community decides is news.

How it works

Once you register, you can begin browsing the Web for news as you usually do. If you see a story you’d like to add to CommonTimes, just click the Add to CommonTimes button which you can drag to your browser bar for easy access.

If you’re the first to add the story, you’ll be asked to select the section that it belongs in. You can also add tags, words or phrases that provide topical descriptors for the story, to help organize our content.

CommonTimes also acts as a news clipping service. Whenever you would like to see what stories you’ve collected, just visit your channel page and you’ll see all the stories you’ve ever bookmarked. You can also share your channel with other readers via the Web or an RSS feed.

What about blogs?

CommonTimes encourages readers to bookmark well-written blog entries. As bloggers begin to break more stories, the blogosphere is important component of any news site.

While Technorati tracks the number of bloggers linking to particular stories, CommonTimes provides a broader, more comprehensive approach to breaking news. In fact, CommonTimes will help great blog entries become a hot story on our site.

Why is this important?

If you’ve used CommonBits.org or read my blog post “Be the Media”, you know that one of our goals at CommonMedia is to provide new tools for citizen journalism to evolve.

As the mainstream media becomes more tightly controlled by conservative corporate interests, CommonTimes provides an important resource for harnessing the best of the Web media (including alternative voices) into a readable, accessible community-oriented form.

CommonTimes is the closest thing to an open source news site that we can imagine, so far.

Send us your feedback

As this is an early release, we know there is a lot remaining to polish and add to the site. Please email us your feedback and ideas. We greatly appreciate it and will try to respond to everyone. You can also post your comments below here.