I don’t think I need to give a big intro into Newsvine at the moment as there are great introductions available such as the one over at SolutionWatch. Mike Davidson is CEO of Newsvine and introduced Newsvine officially last week and quite rightly appears to have caused quite a stir with 104,655 page views in their first full day and a no.2 ranking on Technorati.
I received my invite to this social news site a few days ago and signed up rather sceptically, more out of curiosity than anything else.
I am pleased to say that my initial impressions are very good though. The site very slick, well designed, clear and legible, and while combining modern concepts it has a traditional feel. Conceptually, Newsvine is alike the other social bookmarking/news sites but with news sources such as Associated Press and ESPN, content not solely user submitted . With the ability to ‘Vote’ for stories, comment, blog and submit stories, both editors and users have a similar influence in this social newsroom compared with editorially controlled news sites. Further, covering subjects a varied as ‘entertainment’, ‘science’, ‘health’ and the obligitary ‘tech’, the demographic will differ in social and economic backgrounds to alternative social sites like Digg and Reddit.
In beta testing at the moment it will be interesting to see how this progresses when it is opened up and more users join the show. As the volume of Digg has increased the quality of stories on Digg for example have become somewhat diluted in my opinion. With the diversity of subject areas Newsvine has, I hope that the community that builds up around this project will continue to ensure its validity and integrity as a potentially relevent news source. Time will tell……
The new web toys seem to be coming thinck and fast these days.. All good!
Just started playing with newsvine and so far I’m vastly impressed as well – will likely pay more here today at work and maybe post a quick review as well.
Hi,
While I think Newsvine looks pretty nice, I have some major problems with its User Agreement. I blogged about this here:
http://tadspot.com/2006/01/10/newsvine-user-agreement/
Basically, the agreement says pretty much that they own whatever you write and can change it, “exploit” it or use it without giving you credit for any purpose they wish. I think it’s mainly lawyerese to cover their asses, but the fact that it’s there really ruined my enthusiasm for NewsVine.
[...] More and more rumours are circulating about Digg being snapped up by the Web 2.0 harvester that is Yahoo. $30m is the figure circulating and my point of view is there is no smoke without fire. Both the Search Engine Journal and Techcrunch have posted on this along with countless others recently and I, for one, am keen to see this happen. I posted more on this subject over two weeks ago and have touched on the benefits in another post. According to Kevin Burton’s blog, it’s not a matter of if but when and the announcement could be as soon as next week! // Used for showing and hiding user information in the comment form function ShowUtils() { document.getElementById(“authorinfo”).style.display = “”; document.getElementById(“showinfo”).style.display = “none”; document.getElementById(“hideinfo”).style.display = “”; } function HideUtils() { document.getElementById(“authorinfo”).style.display = “none”; document.getElementById(“showinfo”).style.display = “”; document.getElementById(“hideinfo”).style.display = “none”; } [...]
[...] A little late (on my part) but Newsvine came out of beta on March 1st. The social news site is first class in my opinion and have to say that it has become one of my (almost) daily reads for news, tech and gaming. Check out my first impressions and fears here and if you haven’t already signed up then what are you waiting for? [...]
[...] // Used for showing and hiding user information in the comment form function ShowUtils() { document.getElementById(“authorinfo”).style.display = “”; document.getElementById(“showinfo”).style.display = “none”; document.getElementById(“hideinfo”).style.display = “”; } function HideUtils() { document.getElementById(“authorinfo”).style.display = “none”; document.getElementById(“showinfo”).style.display = “”; document.getElementById(“hideinfo”).style.display = “none”; } [...]