Newsvine

The personal webspace of James Dunn

I am fortunate enough to have been invited to a private beta testing of the new 'Newsvine' service. Although I have only been using it for a few days, I have to say that so far I am impressed!

Newsvine contains all the stories that you would expect to find on the BBC News site, CNN, MNSBC etc, but where it differs is that it allows every registered visitor to comment on the stories that interest them. As one person writes, "it's addictive". In addition to this, once you are registered you are given your own news column where you can write about anything that interests you - from the war in Iraq, to social events happening on the Brunel University campus. Use of keywords then means that your story will be featured in the appropriate area of Newsvine, and available for everyone to see and comment on.

'Seeding' of news stories also means you can point others to news stories you have read, by publishing 'quick' comments that appear on your column and on the main Newsvine site. One final feature I want to mention is the 'vote' system. Each story has a vote icon, and if you have enjoyed what you have just read, or consider it important, clicking on this will increase its importance within Newsvine, and push that story further towards the front page. This means that instead of the news agency controlling the headlines, the population of readers determines what is important. (Whether this is actually a good idea I'm not sure).

Why I find this so interesting is that I think sites with dynamic/always changing content are becoming extremely common, and being creative, not only a technical level, but in terms of involving users is becoming a rarely on the web. Blog's are now commonplace but with these there is a limited amount if interaction between author and reader. Newsvine allows us to not only interact with this content, but push it around, increase or decrease its importance, and build a community of objective and like minded individuals. News in the future may not will not always be taken at face value!

On a side note, I think Newsvine is very similar to an idea I had (Blog my News) for my dissertation back in October, and it will be interesting to see how the idea takes from this point of view! In the meantime I have twenty invites to hand out so if you are interested, please let me know and I will email you one.

Some related sites:

• The man responsible for Newsvine: Mike Davidson
• Another interesting take on the news: 10 by 10

Posted on January 10, 2006 18:58 | Add Comment →