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Sunday, January 15, 2006
Off the Vine
» Posted by Jon at 10:02 pm :: Comments (1)
I've been participating in a beta test of a new news site for the last week or so and now I'm trying to figure out what it means for the future of periodical publications and news (both gathering and dissemination). Newsvine has quite the idea: allow trusted readers to help decide which stories are most important and contribute their own material, in addition to chatting and commenting on everything.
It all starts with everything coming off the Associated Press wire (looks to me like what they call the A-wire -- major national stories -- and the major sports wire, without all the boxscores and stats and such). On each story, readers can leave a comment (like any blog post) or chat in real time with others about that story (which is a little different, but used on maybe 1 percent of stories since it requires simultaneous interest in a particular story) plus vote a story up the rankings, which helps determine what appears on the front page and many other places.
Readers can also "seed" (get it: "vine", "seed". hee hee.) stories from other sites on the web or write their own stories.
Each story, from the wire or reader-contributed, is categorized many different ways. Besides just the usual national, sports, business, tech (and a heavy dose of odd), stories are "tagged" and can then be sorted based on those tags. So there's a page for Apple, the iPod, the Cincinnati Bengals, Michigan college basketball, Starbucks... yeah, you get the idea.
Based on those tags, you can build a watchlist, which collects on those topics (or authors) onto a page for you.
For a few reviews and some screenshots, here are some sites you can check out.
- Heard it on the Newsvine: First impressions from the Hypergene Media Blog, which focuses on "how citizens are changing the future of news and information" its tagline says. It's more of a media theory post. (I'm also intrigued by their idea of Amazoning the News, but that's for another post.)
Newsvine offers a refreshing philosophy that has been missing in online news sites: Let the story not be an end in itself but a starting point for conversation and aggregation of content and different perspectives.
- Newsvine - Seeding the Vine. First Look! -- a comprehensive overview, though I hope he realizes that there will be ads on the site eventually. After all, gotta make money.
- Newsvine.com - the next generation of collaborative news sites - starts, review + first look! -- This guy's British and he's pretty excitable, but you'll get an idea.
In addition, one of the founders is a former member of the web team at Disney, responsible for much of ESPN.com. He's been posting little introductions about his new company:
- Unstealth! Get Ready For Newsvine (Nov. 9, 2005)
- Newsvine: Next Steps (Nov. 17, 2005)
- Newsvine: First Day Traffic, Reviews, and More (Jan. 7, 2006)
Anyway, if it sounds like an experiment you'd like to get in on with me, let me know and I might spare you one of the invites they've granted me.
(There are other sites that do some of this. There's quite a conversation going on about two that have been using reader contributions and voting -- digg vs. slashdot. If you'd like to check out that side of things, start with kottke and this look at the dynamics of digg.)
» Filed under: Deep thinking
Comments
Publish.com has a nice interview with Mr. Davidson, which includes this quote: "We feel an article's life begins when it's published, and there's a conversation that surrounds it. One of the main features of Newsvine is that every page is a conversation."
» Posted by: Jon on Wednesday, January 18, 2006 at 12:05 am
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