Web Service Spotlight – Newsvine

Hello World.

Each Wednesday Whenever I have a chance, I will be featuring a different “Web 2.0” website and providing a sort of mini-review. These may include new services that are better than their competitors, sites that are unique and do things differently, or simply sites that stand out as being useful.

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This week, I am featuring the recently released news website, Newsvine.

News sites on the Internet now come in two flavours. Some follow the traditional “newspaper style”, with a team of editors and writers trawling through information and presenting it as news articles. Others, such as Google News, automatically scan other news sites and sources and present simple headlines with links to the full story.

Newsvine follows neither of these models. Instead, it takes elements from both, adds a bit of extra spice, and presents an entirely new way of reading, writing and sharing news.

“The Wire” is the part of Newsvine that is most like a traditional newspaper. The Wire is made up of stories from sources such as The Associated Press – unedited and posted as soon as they come through on the various news wires.

As well as this, there is “The Vine”, which is made up of user-submitted stories. Users can “seed” the Vine by either linking to a story somewhere else on the web, or writing an original article in their personal column.

By using these two very distinct methods of collecting news, Newsvine can be a completely different service for every user.

Want to read professionally written articles on breaking news from around the world? Stick to The Wire. Want to read what other people around the world are saying about issues? Read The Vine. Want to share that article you found on obscuresportsnews.com? Seed it. Want to report on that local soccer match your team won? Or perhaps you just have to voice your outrage at Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo? Then your column is right there and waiting.

All of these areas (columns, seeds and articles) are accompanied by a voting and commenting system. If you find an article or link that you thought was interesting or well written, vote for it. Posts with more votes (whether simple one-line links or full articles) are pushed to the top of the page. This means that you always have easy access to the most interesting and current news.

If someone has written an article that really gets you angry (or that you heartily agree with), there is no need to write a new article to make your opinion heard. Simply leave a comment on the bottom of the article (and possibly spark up a discussion, as I did).

Commenting is fine if you want to leave a simple opinion about a topic, but it is insufficient if you want to write a full editorial. That is why I think the personal columns are a really important feature. This essentially gives every user a professionally published column that can be read by anyone, anywhere in the world. Your column is placed alongside professional journalists’ and read with the same interest and respect.

This is a very exciting idea. A few years ago, pundits across the globe were speculating that blogs would herald the rise of independent journalism. Yes, blogs allowed every man and his dog to get his voice published, but when the majority of those voices are saying things like “…today I found some more belly-button lint…”, all of a sudden it becomes very hard to take them seriously as a source of news and opinion. With services such as Newsvine, public opinion truly can have a voice which fits in well with established and respected “traditional media”.

Newsvine is a “Web 2.0″ service through and through, complete with AJAX and tags. Now, I’m becoming a bit cynical when it comes to tagging, because I personally don’t think every little tid-bit of information needs to be filed and categorised in a thousand different ways. However, Newsvine has integrated tags very well. The most common tags that would be associated with a news service (“entertainment”, “sport”, etc) are displayed as permanent categories along the top of every page. They are then divided further, with the most popular tags subtly displayed along the top of the relevant sub-pages. This makes it very easy to find the most popular topics at any given moment.

The tags can also be used to find all articles related to a particular topic or person. The simple search function will search for any article tagged with one or multiple tags, making it very easy to search for all current news about very specific topics. For example, I want to find all articles about Microsoft’s new product “Origami”, but not articles about anything else to do with Microsoft.

Newsvine is a very interesting news service, providing many different things for many different types of users. It takes a lot for me to change my homepage, and Newsvine has managed to achieve just that.

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