Instablogs Community Launches

Instablogs Community in simple words is a personalized platform that endeavors to bring bloggers and readers closer. We do it by keeping the focus on the readers and actually making them a part of the whole blogging process.

instablogs community screenshot 3

The Instablogs Community has a plethora of social tools, which not only empower readers but also help them to become writers themselves. The new version encourages better communication between writers and readers and symbolizes the crux of 'Citizen Journalism' or 'Participatory Journalism' in its true sense, i.e. 'Journalism by the people, for the people'.

With growing number of blogs each day (3 million blogs are added every month), new writers taking up blogging are not able to succeed as easily as few years ago. Two of the biggest problems faced by new writers are technical knowledge with respect to blogging and getting an active readership for their new blogs. Instablogs Community has stepped up to solve these two problems for new authors by providing a very user friendly interface which makes submitting an article as easy as sending an email, and providing many social media tools which will help writers to socialize with other members easily and build a steady readership very quickly. Even existing bloggers can benefit by integrating their existing blogs with the Instablogs Community.

The DESIGN

We have designed Instablogs Community in such a way that any member can personalize his experience easily. And, to keep this process a simple one we have left out many common features. We wanted to give our members few but very powerful features to tweak Instablogs Community for himself/herself easily.

Instablogs Community is divided into 7 main sections.

1. Reading Room - All the stories submitted by Instablogs members can be accessed via this section. You can rate and comment on any article here.

2. Newsroom - Instablogs is a News organization, and we too needed to have a Newsroom/News desk. Our members can pick up the news or submit news links/tips here. The only difference between our Newsroom and a traditional Newsroom is that our Newsroom is public and anyone can access it and contribute as well.

3. Community - Want to browse through the Citizen Journalists contributing to Instablogs Community. You are in the right place.

4. MyBlog - Every Community member has a personalized Blog called MyBlog. More about it below.

5. Organize - Part of your Admin section, helps you to organize your posts and comments.

6. Socialize - This section helps you to socialize with other Instablogs members easily. Accessed via Admin Section.

7. Personalize - Again a part of Admin Section, helps you to personalize and tweak your Instablogs Experience.

CHANNELS

The Community is divided into 16 channels, but you can easily opt out from the channels which doesn`t interests you, from 'Manage Channels' tools. You will find it in your Admin Panel > Personalize or you can access it below the channels lists, in the sidebar.

MyBLOG

MyBlog is a personalized blog build automatically for you when you sign up as an Instablogs member. All stories submitted by you are stored here; you can post anything you want. You can also import your existing blogs feed here. Though you can't import more than 3 blogs, and only short excerpt (255 chars) of your existing articles are imported. The imported posts are always linked to original posts on your existing blogs. This can be a great way for existing bloggers to get your blog good traffic easily. We are also working on features, which will help you to integrate your Flickr, PhotoBucket and YouTube media in your MyBlog.

MyBlog design is inspired by CSSZenGarden. The HTML coding is done in a way to give a total control over the style of a hypertext document. If you want to help with MyBlog themes, you can submit us your CSS. Every theme submitted by you and used by our members will be linked to you from the footer.

This was a project, which was completed in over 3 months with a team of 3 developers/designers. Instablogs v2.0 is currently in Beta stage and our team is adding new features weekly. Please report any bugs or errors you find in any section.

We intend to make Instablogs Community a platform for any Citizen Journalist to come report/analyze/discuss the news and events in a democratic fashion and turn his individual point of view into a public opinion.