Mollom sites
The Industry Standard using Drupal and Mollom
The online media industry continues to face readership and revenue challenges. They are burdened with the task of not only providing the content but gaining more user interaction in the form of reader comments. Comments by readers are beneficial to sites because they show created readership and mean more eyeballs to that particular page or article. For publishers, more eyeballs means more revenue.
The Industry Standard is a news and analysis site owned by IDG, a large publishing organization that publishes over 300 magazines in 85 countries!
The Industry Standard re-launched on Drupal in 2008 with the goal of engaging with new readers and encouraging them to contribute comments and content. They also wanted to allow readers to comment anonymously, something that most news sites do not do. The Industry Standard felt that anonymity gave readers more freedom to express their comments, and would encourage more frequent and detailed commentary while expanding traffic and tying the publication into the many other online conversations taking place around technology.
Ian Lamont, The Industry Standard's managing editor, had prior experience managing online communities, and knew that the relaunched publication would need a comment filter that could encourage quality comments while sifting out spam and trolls.
According to Lamont, having anonymous comments is hugely important to The Industry Standard. "We really believe that most people don't want to deal with the hassle of registration. Because we are relatively small, if we only had registered comments, there would be far less reader engagement on the site. As it is now, we can have dialogues with unregistered users, which is really important to building voice and an online identity."
The Industry Standard is using Mollom to help them remove the barrier to visitor participation, allowing readers to comment anonymously and eliminate spam vandalism. Since the re-launch in 2008, Mollom has blocked 800k spam messages in 539 days and blocked more than a thousand attempts a day with peaks up to several thousands a day. Cool!
Radio Netherlands Worldwide using Drupal
Radio Netherlands Worldwide (Radio Nederland Wereldomroep in Dutch or RNW for short) is a public radio and television network based in The Netherlands. Radio Netherlands Worldwide is a very old international public broadcaster, with regular transmissions that began in 1927 to the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.
What is interesting about the site is not the design or the implementation, but the fact that, after many years with Alterian (formerly Mediasurface), they switched to Drupal. Alterian is a supplier of proprietary content management systems, with their flagship product being Morello. The RNW started with the Internet early on (1992) and by doing so suffered from the law of the handicap of a head start: a history of dated, proprietary CMS-es that held them back from moving to the more current software.
RNW selected Drupal because of its multi-lingual capabilities (they support up to 6 languages, including Chinese and Arabic content) and Drupal's flexibility and agility. The migration to Drupal was done by Dutch Open Projects and took 3 months with a team of 5 people.
Bert Boerland, project manager at Dutch Open Projects, wrote the following on the switch to Drupal: By itself, the fact that Radio Netherlands Worldwide switches from a proprietary CMS towards an Open Source CMS is not the biggest news. However, the switch is a milestone since it symbolizes that companies that didn't look to Open Source and only listened to the proprietary "prietpraat" are moving over! [The word prietpraat is Dutch and translates roughly to "childish non-sense".]
With both RNW and the Dutch public broadcaster NCRV using Drupal, and through Acquia's partnership with Woodwing (Woodwing is a Dutch company), the media landscape in Europe's low-lands has some critical mass to push Drupal into more traditional broadcasting companies. Drupal starts to disrupt the traditional, proprietary web content management space increasingly more.
With an editorial staff of over one hundred people, RNW publicizes dozens of postings a day including their own video and audio, and will soon incorporate even more, including user-generated content and content from their five-thousand-plus partner stations around the world. To keep all this content on track, RNW choose Drupal, coupled with the usual contributed modules (CCK and Views, FCKeditor, Pathauto, etc). They use Organic Groups as their core for separating and integrating their eleven editorial staffs. RNW gets lots of traffic from around the world and so, gets lots of spam, they are also a paying Mollom user; Mollom blocks hundreds of spam comments a day for them.
NowPublic using Mollom
NowPublic is a Vancouver-based news network that mobilizes an army of reporters to cover events around the world. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in affected areas than most news organizations have on their entire staff.
Unfortunately, NowPublic was up against as many as 25,000 spam attempts a day, so it needed a solution that would allow the site to grow faster and more effectively without being slowed by comment spam. About one year ago, NowPublic implemented Mollom to protect their site against spam. They use Drupal, so all they needed to do was install the Mollom module for Drupal.
Two major challenges arise from trying to control website spam. First, visitors may lose their motivation to comment or contribute content because they are required so often to prove that they are human and not spam by registering. This erodes participation. Secondly, whether visitors are asked to register or not, site moderation becomes more time-consuming and expensive. Website moderators have to scan comments and other content to find spam instead of interact with the community. Mollom differs from other spam protection solutions, in that it tries to address both problems.
While Mollom is not perfect (it is a work in progress), it works really well for the vast majority of our users. In NowPublic's case, Mollom has prevented more than one million spam attempts since they started using Mollom. Plus, because Mollom removed barriers to participation, they saw an 180% increase in the average number of comments posted per month by users since implementing Mollom's spam-filtering service. Last but not least, according to Jordan Yerman, NowPublic's Contributor Support Manager, Mollom saved NowPublic at least one hour per day dealing with spam. So by the end of the first month, they saved more money than Mollom cost them for the year.
Needless to say, NowPublic is one of my favorite Mollom success stories. Now they are one year into using Mollom, it is rewarding to look back and see how well it has worked for them.
(Disclosure: I am an advisor to NowPublic.)
Jacksonville using Drupal
Jacksonville, the largest city in Florida, is using Drupal (and Mollom) at http://jacksonville.com. The Florida Times-Union is the major daily newspaper in Jacksonville and Jacksonville.com is its official website. Cool!
Harvard using Drupal
I recently learned about the fact that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society is using Drupal. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society is a research center founded at Harvard Law School whose fellows included internet gurus like David Weinberger, John Perry Barlow, Dave Winer, Jimmy Wales, Doc Searls and many more.
Other notable Drupal sites at Harvard are the website of the Science and Engineering department, the website of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (they aim to solve major problems that affect society and the well-being of human populations), the website of Initiative in Innovative Computing (a center of expertise in solving very difficult computing problems), and last but not least Harvard Magazine (a magazine that keeps 240,000 alumni connected to the university). Harvard Magazine is also using Mollom.
Gamezebo using Drupal
Gamezebo is using Drupal and Mollom to power its game community. For those who don't know, Gamezebo is a Webby Award-nominated website that focuses on editorial coverage of the "casual games industry". The site is founded by industry veteran Joel Brodie, former head of business development at Yahoo! Games, and has an editorial staff that has written for publications like USA Today, CNN, and the New York Times. Tree House Agency completed all of the development and theming of the site.
Michael Jackson using Drupal
Not only is there a new tour, but MichaelJackson.com, the official site for fans of the King of Pop, has just re-launched, featuring some new community-oriented features and some old-school graphics from back in the day. MichaelJackson.com was built using Drupal by the good folks at Sony Music. They are also using Mollom to protect against comment and forum post spam. Moonwalks!
