Newsvine

I just got an invite from my former supervisor to the newest news aggregation site, Newsvine. I’m already a registered user of Digg (though I’ve only ever voted and commented, never suggesting a link myself) and I get traffic to this blog via Topix (which I find a bit confusing) so I’m curious to find out what this new service has to offer.

From the Mike Davidson: Unstealth! blog:

Newsvine is a news company, not a Web 2.0 company

Our site doesn’t rely on Ajax, RSS, Wikis, or any of the other technologies you may be hearing about way too often these days. If you’d like to use some of the fancier aspects of our site like tagging or feeds, go ahead, but even with no knowledge beyond standard pointing and clicking, Newsvine is a best of breed news site. In other words, even your pappy can use it.

So if it’s not a buzzword-driven news site (even though it does have “tags” and they do have an official blog), what does it have over other news aggregators? Money.

Turns out you can monetize the stories you “newsvine”, to borrow a Digg parlance, via your “column”. Basically, if you “seed” a story and folks look at it or click on it from your “column” you get a percentage of the ad revenue. Here’s my column – decidedly barren at the moment, but hopefully will get a little fuller in the vain attempt to get beer money. Steve Rubel has a more scholarly rundown on his blog.

Like Digg, I can see myself voting on stories or adding comments, but my link speed is decidely slow, so I probably won’t “seed” much on Newsvine. The exception to this rule might be pimping my own blog, but I’m sure I’d run afoul of netiquette in that regard.

Still, I’m going to try it out for a while. I’ve already found some blog-fodder articles and added their “Seed Newsvine” bookmarklet to Firefox, but time will tell whether or not it’s a) a winning concept or b) something I’m willing to use and engage in.

UPDATE: Digg notes an O’Reilly article, “Digg is Slashdot’s Death Knell“, whose author also runs a new aggregator – 180° news.

And Dennis in the comments points out Nulltag and reddit. Thanks!

2 thoughts on “Newsvine

Leave a Reply