Heard it through the Newsvine
The latest addition to the Web 2.0 landscape is a new site called Newsvine. Newsvine is a new web service that is available to Beta testers and the twenty people they choose to invite into the system.
Here’s the gist. It’s basically a news site, like CNN, NYTimes or MSNBC — with a twist. There are three types of stories: Your run of the mill wire stories, user-written content/stories, and seeded stories. All stories, regardless of which of these three it is, have the ability to have comments and “rank.” If your find the story interesting, you can give it a +1 and it will increase the rank by one. Stories with the most rank and the most comments bubble up to the front page of their particular section.
The first two content-types are fairly straightforward. The third, however, is a link to an article living on an external site that they think is interesting. You can then give your summary and comments when you post. This is taking the Digg Model and including all sorts of news.
If you’re a writer, there’s an extra perk. Any ad revenue that is generated from the user-generated content is shared by you. Not only that, but any ad revenue generated by users that you get to sign up is also part of your share. Consider it Amway for online publishing. Similar to the early Epinions Model, but in this case you’re writing about news — not reviews.
Sounds interesting, huh? Well, there’s two ways to sign up. You can either go to the site and sign up for a beta tester account — which will take about a week. Or if you’re really interested, post a comment and I can probably hook you up with an account. I’ve dished a few out to a few editorial/industry folks that I think might find this interesting — but also to a few peeps big up in the blog/web community.
Either way, it seems like a pretty cool idea. I spend quite a bit of time poking around on DIGG.com for various stories, but having this for all sorts of news is that much more exciting.
