News on the vine
Newsvine is a ‘news website’ that was recently launched. However, although news is the main theme, it’s actually a bit of a social community website as well.
Left: Newsvine screenshot – Sports section
A nice clean design and a very well-organised layout makes Newsvine easy to use. Throw in a few Ajax effects with some Flash and the complete package is very user-friendly
Users can read and browse news stories that are aggregated from various news sources from around the world. Additionally, registered users get their own ‘column’ where they can create their own news articles and post links (‘seed the vine’) to other news items on the web. Posting links is very easy using the browser bookmarklets that are provided.
Info: Newsvine has a Code of Honor which explicity forbids self-promotion – although it is possible to cross-post a complete article from your own blog.
Posting and keyword tagging links to other news stories will provide content for Newsvine but the registered user can also comment on each item posted, start an online chat with other users, and vote for each item. Items with more votes will appear higher on the Newsvine pages. Users can create watch lists based on keyword tags to follow specific news items.
Related: Digg is a website that uses a similar voting approach for technology-based news items. There is some overlap between the two websites but Newsvine has a broader news approach and a wider range of different features.
Interestingly, one of the Newsvine Help pages says that registered users will get paid 90% of advertising revenue from their column page (when advertising goes online). I am not sure if this will provide more than a few pence to the average ‘columnist’ but it is an incentive to become an active member of the community!
Naturally, being the web geek that I am, I also looked at the webpage source code and was pleasantly surprised to find a CSS-based layout. Just shows that a complex website can be created in this way.
I think it will be interesting to see how Newsvine develops.
PS Here’s my newsvine column
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