Newsvine

Newsvine Beta

I have been lucky enough to get an invite to Newsvine which has been developed by Mike Davidson. It has all the hallmarks of a Web 2.0 application, and is well worth checking out.

Newsvine is a new way of getting news, it has articles written by members and allows you to "seed" articles that are external. You can then vote, comment, chat or subscribe to the rss feed. There is also a tagging system for news articles, but it appears these are created by the author not the viewers.

It has a great visual design and an intelligent use of AJAX - including the ability to tell you if the username you want is already in use without submitting your form - brilliant idea.
As it went live on the 5th January and I got my invite on the 6th it is still early days, a lot of the articles have been fed in from Associated Press, but this a least guarentees a level of quality from the news articles, one I wonder if they can maintain.

In order to try and maintain a high level of quality members can invite new members, but are considered responsible for the actions of the people they invite. You are rewarded for introducing constructive members.

My biggest criticism at the moment is that is seems very UScentric, but I've just found a dropdown to localise my region to London, which might help. However UK would have been fine since there are no other UK cities to choose from.

Overall it is an excellent design and interesting idea, I think longevity of use will decide it's real value.

Next I hope to look at Basecamp.