Kapost: Helping you crowdsource content

I wrote about Kapost not long ago, noting that I was beginning to try out this beta application. Kapost is essentially a multi-user blogging platform where your community can come together to further to share their blog posts. It is separate from your blog but useful in that you can easily move content from Kapost into your primary blog.

How much does Kapost cost?

Kapost is currently free.

How does it work?

Kapost has put together an excellent video:

How are we using Kapost?

You’ll see a “Join our News Room” tab in my primary blog’s menu above. When you click upon it you will notice articles from a core group of contributors that have begun to participate in our newsroom. You will note:

• Some articles are listed as Promoted. This simply means that the articles have been promoted from our newsroom to our blog here.
• All articles can be read directly in the newsroom. Articles that have not been promoted contain great stories and useful information as well, they are simply articles that we felt were either too narrow or not 100% right for the majority of our readers.
• Contributors are listed on the Contributor tab, of course.
• Yours can “sign-up” to create their own contributor accounts, in order to join the conversation. The benefits include:
  • Additional SEO benefits as content is indexed by the major search engines and includes links back to your original content.
  • Early membership in a growing community, one that will become a useful information source shared by many over time.
  • You can set it up and forget about it by simply adding your blogs RSS feed to your profile. This way, all content automatically arrives in the newsroom without you worrying about having to enter it twice. If you do not want to set up RSS, that’s fine as well, just add articles as you desire.

Problems with Kapost?

It is still an early stage product and problems occur. In my experience the team at Kapost is extremely responsive, however. It is easy to report bugs or make product suggestions (via the Report Bug link in the footer) and the team is actively engaging.

If you’re interested, give it a try. Let me know what you think.

John

Originally posted on Government in The Lab.