NowPublic.com, a Drupal powered citizen journalism site, rolled out version 3 this week. As with V1 and 2 we are building all the functionality of the newsroom into tools that are free for anyone to use. The idea being that through collaboration, writers/bloggers, photographers and editors can all make contributions to the news. The result is news built by the people, more closely representing our interests. Anyone can post what they’re reading (like digg or newsvine), file written stories (like a blogging tool) or upload photos (i.e. flickr), audio and videos (as with youtube).

A lot has happened in the last year since we launched the first version of NowPublic.com. The first thing your likely to notice is the new look and feel. We also updated our thumbprint technology which allows anyone to use the footage (audio, video, photos) that has been uploaded to NP on their own site or blog. We introduced a new tool called the Public View (a bookmarklet, soon to be a browser plug-in) so members can easily share the news they read, and we improved a lot of the workflow to make it easier to contribute and share your news. A major technical goal of version 3 was performance and scalability. A lot of work was done w/ Danga’s memcached to cache session, anon anonymous pages, variables, menu, taxonomy, etc. as well as some expensive functions.

Our team continues to grow; we’ve got a bunch of really smart and talented people helping us. In addition to an awesome and growing team of Drupal rock stars (note, we are hiring - please contact me if you are interested in learning more), with the launch of v3 we are announcing many new advisors: Dan Gillmor, JD Lasica, Howard Rheingold, and Dries have all come on as advisors.

Have a look at our latest incarnation. If you’ve got any feedback please let us know!