What Newsvine Is and Should Be

Author's Note: This article will be presenting my vision for Newsvine's ideal role in my life. As such, please expect some small rants and a lot of wishful thinking. This is an opinion piece (an explanation of mine, not a prescription for yours) and should be treated as such.

An Introductory Story

(or, How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love the Vine)

It was a long time ago, mid 2005 I believe, and I had recently discovered Digg. I thought it was a grand idea. I had tried to read Slashdot, but didn't agree fully with the editorial picks. When I found Kevin Rose's creation, I really enjoyed the user input, the responsive interface, and the ability to "digg" something and then go back and find it later. I recommended the site enthusiastically to my father, who is also interested in technology, explaining: "Anyone can submit a link, but only the ones that are voted up make it to the front page! That way the spam is kept to a minimum." My father immediately noted that relying so heavily on user input was a double-edged sword, since the stories brought to the top were not necessarily good, just voted-for. I thought he was talking mainly about the possibility of gaming Digg, and I dismissed his concerns, saying that, by and large, the Digg community was responsible.

Six months later, I check Digg very rarely, and my father's point is only one of the many reasons why:

• Digging for stories is a pain. What's my motivation? There may not be too much spam on the front page, but it's in the digg pile. Posts that aren't spam are often misspelled, grammatically horrendous, or just plain uninteresting. I suppose I should Digg things that are interesting to me... but how interesting? And am I supposed to come to Digg to consume interesting stories, or to mark them interesting for others?
• Digging outside the pile is useless. A number of web authors have noted that there is a great divide between the number of votes for stories on the Digg front page and stories in the pile. Once a story makes it to the front page hundreds vote it up, but an interesting story may only get a vote or two before being buried deep in the depths of the pile. The only useful place to digg is in the pile, and as we've already discussed, that's just not fun. Again: what's my motivation for digging a link?
• I started using del.icio.us When I created my Digg login, I had not yet used del.icio.us. Once I did, it was a real nail in the coffin for Digg. Because I started using del.icio.us, I stopped suggesting new links to Digg. This had two significant effects. First it removed a huge portion of my reason for using Digg: to mark interesting stories and be able to retrieve them later. Secondly, once I stopped posting links on Digg (and hoping others would vote them up), I stopped looking through the pile for worthwhile stories to vote up myself (karma being what it is). As a result, Digg became strictly a place where I discovered new, interesting links, and I became more critical of the quality of their front page. I even stopped digging things as often. If a link was really interesting, I'd just bookmark it in del.icio.us instead.
• The herd is, by definition, plebeian. My father's original point: the same collective intelligence that keeps the spam away also thinks that someone changing their name to Optimus Prime is really, really cool. Don't get me wrong - it is - but I don't have that much time in my day for (essentially) useless links like that, so I have to ration them. If Digg is giving me the latest useful tech dish, then feed me, Seymour! But if it's just a repository for the latest CollegeHumor.com nonsense, I'll eat seldom and sparingly.

I first heard whispers of Newsvine over on TechCrunch, and made mental note of the name. When the site officially launched in March, I signed up to see what all the fuss was about. The utopian flame of user-edited news was rekindled in my heart. When I saw the Code of Honor and the proposed ad model, it sealed the deal. I realized that I was going to get evangelical.

I Love It, But What Is It?

I was smitten with Newsvine, but completely flabbergasted as to how I was supposed to use the thing. There were watch buttons and watch lists, buttons to seed and icons representing an outside link, tags to search and regions to choose. There were seeds to seed, and articles to write: Event, Opinion, and Other! I was eager to uphold the Code, but it almost petrified me. I worried about whether links were really worthy of seeding, and I couldn't think of anything about which to write. I wanted to be a journalist, not a whiny blogger, and so I kept my mouth shut for a while.

My first story stemmed from my first dissatisfaction with Newsvine. At the time, I was reading the site mostly through an RSS reader, and I was just taking the straight main page feed (Wire & Vine). I felt that a ridiculously large portion of the stories were about sports, and I wondered if others felt the same. I posted an article on the subject in the early afternoon and had my first comment by 7:30pm, from a member of the Newsvine team no less! I was impressed.

My Newsvine habits have changed sine those early days (last month). Today I visit the site frequently to check the Conversation Tracker, and have the RSS feed from my Watchlist page in my aggregator instead. I feel I have a fairly good handle on how to use the site. Here's how it works...

The content on Newsvine is separated into User Generated Content and Syndicated Content. The Syndicated Content comes from the AP and ESPN, but I hear that the team is planning on adding more sources in the future. The User Content comes in two flavors: Articles and Seeds. The line separating them is fairly thin, the distinction being mostly one of convention.

Articles are simple user generated content. Seeds are like Articles with one main source. They have a large "Read Article" button at the top with the source of the article noted in grey nearby. The expectation is that Seeds are very similar to diggs, where the bulk of content is on another site. The text that a user writes for a Seed is usually short, serving to give some context to the story and to make an argument as to why it is worth the time to read, but this is not a necessity. Seeds could be used to do full-scale reviews of other webpages, and with the "Read Article" button above the text of the seed, they seem well suited to that sort of application.

The Seed/Article choice does affect where the article is shown on Newsvine. Both Articles and Seeds are intermingled in the "Vine" listing for any tag, but if you view any of the main "Topic" tags, like world-news, us-news, sports, or politics, you get a couple of extra boxes displayed. Near the top of the page is "Top Seeds" and under that is "Featured Writers". Only Articles are listed in the Featured Writers section. I really enjoy the Featured Writers section, and I wish there were something similar for all tag pages, because I'm usually much more interested in user Articles than Seeds.

At the time of writing, there are three ways to label Articles. They can either be News Event, News Opinion, or Other. That information is put to little use on the site, and there are plans to expand the options. (Keep an eye out for articles on the subject from andria and me.) Before we can begin to think about what those new categories should be, we must consider how they'd fit into the Newsvine of the future.

What Newsvine Should Be

Before I get all self-centered and list off my demands on the hard-working Newsvine team, let's hear what the boss-man, CEO Mike Davidson, has to say. When he introduced Newsvine on his blog, he made it sound like Digg, but for general news, and with an added bonus of users writing articles. He did have a dream though, a dream that the life of a news article might only begin when it's published:

We believe in turning news into conversation, and every page on Newsvine.com is designed to do precisely that. (source)

In another article on Publish.com, Mike expresses a commitment to seeing better local news on the web, and denied any interest in video - at least for now. Newsvine's success at local news has been questioned. Mike fully expected user articles to be more opinionated than the AP stories, emphasizing that it's not a bad thing. I'm sure he hasn't been disappointed by the amount of opinion on "The Whine", and I agree that bias is fine as long as there is disclosure. If stories could be rated on a Biased-Impartial continuum, by both authors and readers, that information could be used to filter stories based on user preference. Mike hinted at a similar feature which has yet to be implemented at Newsvine:

And we're also allowing the user to set the focus. We have this thing we call focus. You can set the focus of your front page. Your front page starts out pulling in all the normal information, like world news and politics. But if you want all sports or to combine sports with technology, you can do that. (source)

I believe that Newsvine should be a source of respectable news material on the web. If you want the latest rumors on technology or beltway gossip, go elsewhere, but if you want stories that are well written and don't need to be retracted later, come to Newsvine. To aid in this goal, a way of rating sources (for Seeds) would be very welcome.

In an ideal future, Newsvine would be my main method of consuming current event stories. It would collect trusted feeds (from the AP, ESPN, Wired?) and display them in the Wire section. The user articles would be arranged into different subtopics, each available as a widget on a customizable display. Not only would I write my own column, but I would be the editor of my own magazine - my very own version of the Newsvine front-page. No. Wait. Make that magazines!

With a little bit of luck, that's exactly where Newsvine is headed...

This article is part of a series examining the various ways Newsvine users view the site and envision its future.
Please consider reading other articles in the series.