Social networking and community building are major priorities for most websites.  Being able to connect the people who access the same information makes the user experience richer.

Obviously the phenomenon of sites like Facebook and MySpace has shown the value of social networks.  However, content based sites have yet to find an effective way to either tap in to existing communities for syndication or create their own...until now. 

CMN has deployed a new social networking software on Collegepublisher.com called Flux.  Flux was a fledgling open source project that MTV Networks has pursued and driven in the last two years.  It is able to organize and connect a community that accesses content-based sites and can work symbiotically with pre-existing social networking sites (Facebook and the like).

The Collgepublisher.com Flux community is the beta test to discover how well newspaper sites can harness the power of this software.  Upon success and some more development, the goal is to roll Flux onto all CP5 websites.

Some of the features in this site enabled by Flux include:

• fShare (the ability to seamlessly offer sharing to other social networking sites)
• Profiles for community members
• Robust community pages
• Easy signup/login
• Easy integration for videos and photos
• User contributed Video, photo, forum content
• Discussion boards
• Content moderation tools
• Content flagging system

We encourage you to register on this site and use some of the features available to the community such as profiles, article bookmarking, article commenting, forum discussions and group page creation.

Ideally, this will help CMN staff stay in touch with partners easier and faster when we have updates on contests and opportunities, software upgrades, and new content.  This site is designed to host the entire library of best practices in digital publishing for the college market and that can only happen with the contributions from the community.

Login and let us know what you think.