Newsvine Beta

Someone send me a Newsvine invite! I’ve heard a lot about this new website called Newsvine lately, and I’m dying to check it out. Newsvine wants to be the Digg.com to the not-so-bleeding-edge masses of online users, whose primary source of news still comes from traditional sites like CNN and MSNBC. What makes Newsvine different, though, is that they are not simply a culmination of mainstream media sites (although that would be cool), they also include blogs and stories found on the net and submitted by their community of users; and when I say "blogs," I don’t mean personal blog entries like those about what your cute little poopie-kins did today, rather blog entries that are more like news stories — editorial journalism at its best.

Submitted stories are auto-tagged, categorized, and displayed online without any filtering. To find anything on Newsvine, the URL would be newsvine.com/subject, where subject would be news item you want to read about. So far, the reviews are good, but I wonder how the masses will ever hear of this new website. I like the idea of catering to the average online user, but it’s hard to make them aware of a new site without a big marketing campaign. Unless you count an isolated phenomena like MySpace, it takes time and a lot of money to bring the average surfer to your new site; they simply aren’t in the loop. Still, that’s not to say it can’t be done or that Newsvine won’t be the one that makes it happen. Let’s wait and see….now, how about that invite?