Newsvine- a review

Yet another post by Jesse, who is still substituting for Aaron.

It’s not digg. It’s not del.icio.us. It’s not Reuters. It’s not really comparable to anything. Newsvine.com.

Here I’ll attempt to give you an idea of how one of the newest, and cleverest sites out there. Newsvine is being heralded as the next digg/delicious/etc., but I say it’s not. I think it’s far better than either of those, and it’s still in beta.

Look and Feel

Here’s the concept- Newsvine is divided into several categories: Top News, World, U.S., Sports, Politics, Tech, Entertainment, Science, Business, Health, and Odd News. Each category has several sub-categories (in sports, NFL, NBA, MLB, Soccer, etc.).

On each page it will have the lead story from the AP wire with a picture at the top, as well as more stories below that.

On the right side there are the top AP stories, then below that the top “seeded” stories (I’ll get to that in a minute), and then below that recent “seeded” stories.

On the top of the left side you have some personal navigation with links to your column and all that.

Below that are some feed links for you to subscribe to different categories via RSS.

So now you have an idea of what the site look and navigation is like.

Use

When you first sign up for Newsvine you fill out some information (display name, profile, profile pic, etc.) and then choose your Newsvine subdomain.

Since I write about football, I managed to snag nfl.newsvine.com.

Once you finish that you are given a column at the subdomain you chose, along with an account to use the features of the site. At your column you have two types of posts- Normal and seeded links. Normal posts are just that: You have a title, and then your article. Seeded links are more like Digg-You link to a story with a short description. You then add a description of the article.

There is also a section of your subdomain for you to add links.

After stories are written, you tag them. People can then comment on them, but they can also, er, “digg” them, I don’t know what the proper term is, but that’s the equivilent. Stories that get the most “diggs” rise higher on the sidebar. Like a combo of del.icio.us popular and digg.

Newsvine can also function as a news reader of sorts. If you find an author or subject you really enjoy, you can “watch” them, meaning that when they post new content, it gets put on your “watchlist” where you can look at what’s new.

Income

Once the site is out of beta and into the mainstream, ads will be put up. On your personal column you will be paid 90% of the revenue from your ads. The remaining 10% goes to the person who referred you. If no one referred you, the money goes to server costs and all that. I imagine they’ll have ads on the main pages as well to help cover costs and make some money for the founders.

More features coming

There are still many more features that are in development, planning, or will probably be added in the future. Among the ones they are working on is automatic seeding of an RSS feed. That would mean I could give them the RSS feed of my blog, and have them seed it to the NFL section. Whenever I make a post, it will automatically be seeded to the NFL category in Newsvine. This could be a tremendous boost in traffic for some bloggers, but I can also see this leading to a lot of spam. It will be interesting to see how Newsvine handles the growth they get when they go public.

Wrap up

All in all, I was incredibly impressed with Newsvine. It doesn’t sound like much, and it can take an hour or so to really figure out all the features. At first I didn’t see any point in the site, but the more I use it the more I like it.

As a publicity tool, this site could be very powerful, as I see it getting a huge amount traffic, and some of that traffic can very easily be channeled to your blog.

To be honest, I see it very quickly overtaking sites like Digg and del.icio.us. If done right. If the founders aren’t overly ambitious, the sky’s the limit.

Invites

I currently have 18 invites to Newsvine. If you e-mail me with a one page essay explaining why you think you could use it well, and what you will give me in return, I would be willing to hand them out.

Not really. If you’re interested, e-mail me at jedck at yahoo dot com, and I’ll give them to the first people that ask.

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