Newsvine
Friday, 27 January 2006 by Jacob TomawThe post below was originally written for Newsvine. Newsvine is a new news service that has three main areas: read, write, and seed. All of these activities involve the power of tagging the articles.
Reading is pretty obvious; you read news. They include news from the AP, ESPN, and other news services and allow you to vote and comment on them. I have found that I am reading a bit more news than I usually do. There is something about the way it is laid out that makes it not feel like you are dredging for stuff to read. I have also been adding my 2 cents in comments.
Writing means that any user can write stories. This is intended to be an outlet for citizen journalism, not personal blog entries. If you have a story to tell this is where you can tell it and share it with the rest of the community. My article started as a comment to a story and after the third paragraph I thought it would be better to make a post.
Seeding means you can add outside article to the Newsvine system. If you read a great article at someinterestingoffbeatnewssite.com you can seed it by providing the link and a short summery of the article. This works much the same way Digg does, but the community is focused a little differently. I have not had a chance to seed anything, because I am rarely looking at any news sites.
There are some other features, like profit sharing, which make this rather interesting. However, right now it is a private beta. So if you try to see my articles at tfl.newsvine.com you will be shown a login screen. I first heard about Newsvine yesterday on the latest episode of Inside the Net. I emailed the host, Amber MacArthur, for an invite and she graciously sent me one. The creator of the site said they hope to be going public in the next few weeks. Until then, I have 20 invites to give out. If you are interested let me know.