Newsvine is a news website where users, or citizen reporters, contribute blog like posts or more traditional news stories to the Newsvine site and community. Notice that I said community – this is not a typical passive experience news site. Like Digg.com, users vote and comment on stories. The amount of votes and comments a story receives determines the overall visibility of your story. Highly popular stories make the front page – other stories never see the light of day. The user generated content is built around a complete, and non-programmed feed from the Associated Press news service. The sheer number of AP stories is really staggering – we’re used to content programmers at media outlets whittling this content down to bite-size morsels for us. I believe Newsvine also features ESPN content.
As you can imagine, the fact that you have full access to the AP wire is both a good and bad thing, but it’s clear that the purpose of the AP content is to give people fodder to have conversations around. That’s the real point of Newsvine. The action is in the conversation that takes place between the readers and author, and reader to reader. You participate in Newsvine by reading, commenting, voting on stories, and writing your own stories. You can also ‘seed’ Newsvine by publishing story excerpts from interesting web sites and stories that you read elsewhere on the net. For example, you’re reading your local online newspaper and there is an interesting story on rising crime rates. By putting a piece of that story on Newsvine others will then come to know about the story, and just like AP, or user generated stories, people ‘on the vine’ can vote your story ‘up the vine,’ and comment.
One thing that makes Newsvine so fun to use is the tools they give users to interact. There are many taken from different successful communication, web, or social media sites. You can make friends, chat, e-mail, create watch lists, and more. What’s really different though are the tools that let you track your interactions and contributions. For example, it’s really easy to return to Newsvine and check on how people reacted to a comment you made on a story. You can track authors, stories, comments, geographic regions, the list goes on. It all brings you closer to the news and the people who are writing it and reacting to it. I’m not even a big news consumer and there’s something about this service that is addictive.
The Internet marketer in Shannon and me is also fascinated by the triggers that cause people to react to content. I wrote a humorous comment on someone’s story last night and I had more votes (by far) on my comment than all the other comments. This was especially interesting to me because NO ONE in the conversation thread, the author or readers, acknowledged my comment. When you read the comments they were very much interacting and talking with each other – but not to me. Because of the Newsvine voting functionality, I learned that readers liked what I wrote, but I also found out that what I wrote did not induce a conversation. This is pretty powerful stuff for a blogger or marketer to learn, given that a major goal of both fields is to connect ideas and people and create a relationship that is relevant, engaging, and interactive.
Did I mention that it’s also just fun being part of the community? I’m enjoying the exercise of writing stories more in the voice of a reporter, vs. a blogger. The wider scope of the audience requires you to explain things in more general terms, which contrasts with a blog where you can assume readers have some interest and expertise in your subject matter to begin with. Except for general purpose blogs like Julians.name that’s aren’t about anything at all (apologies to Seinfeld).
Shannon and I are excited by the opportunity to expose a new audience to our blogs while also connecting with writers and people we might not otherwise find in the blogosphere. We have already seen some lift in traffic on our blogs from the stories we’ve posted on the vine. That was true even before we made it out of the Greenhouse which is impressive given the Greenhouse’s limited audience (more on the Greenhouse in a minute). It’s also yet another venue to increase our expertise in the emerging field of social media optimization (a useful term coined recently by Rohit Bhargava). BTW: Shan has published a couple of pieces on social media optimization, (SMO) on our online recruitment marketing blog EXCELER8ion. I originally used the term social network marketing (you’d never know I was a marketer) but fortunately Rohit’s term saved me from the most unfortunate use of the acronym SNM… Anyway, to wrap your head around SMO, think search engine optimization (SEO) type practices applied to social media like blogs, forums, wikis, Newsvine, RSS, MySpace, Flickr, etc. You can also check out the new wikipedia definition for a just-so description of SMO
Which is a perfect segue to explain our post title and the picture below. And you thought I’d never get to it. When you first start using Newsvine your stories don’t automatically appear everywhere on the vine. There’s a proving ground where you have to contribute stories, vote, comment, and otherwise interact with fellow users. People find new users by going to the Greenhouse (there’s a link on the left side navigation of the Newsvine web site). If they like your content, which includes anything you’ve written or ‘seeded’ from another news site, they vote for you. This voting, combined with all the other aspects of interaction (commenting, voting, etc.), eventually get you out of the Greenhouse and into the general community. Why didn’t they just call it the dog house? The message is clear, the more you interact and use ALL of the Newsvine features, the faster you climb the Greenhouse leaderboard and the quicker you get out. Not a bad way to teach people how to use the tools either. People on the top of the page are the closest to graduating to the general community. You’ll be shocked to learn that Shannon took this as our latest venue to compete. I started out way ahead of Shannon but within a day she was nipping at my heals in the Greenhouse, despite my head start. Very early this morning, while Shannon was sleeping, I staggered (careened even) down the halls of the vine, voting, seeding, commenting and even posting to see if I could push myself out of the Greenhouse. But, try as I might, I couldn’t get into the number one position – never mind out onto the vine. Not only that, while Shannon was sleeping, my voting for her stories inched her up a couple of spots (I’m taking full credit) so that we were right next to each other – with me on top, just as it should be. I took the screen shot shown above because I didn’t know how long it would stay that way. Good thing, because this morning when I logged in, you couldn’t find either of us in the Greenhouse. I guess this means that we’re bona fide members of the community now. It feels a little like graduating from Kindergarten and moving into grade school, sad, terrifying, and exciting all at the same time.
There’s even a revenue model thrown in for you budding authors out there. As Newsvine grows their advertiser base (something they’re still struggling with at present) you get compensated for the traffic you receive from the stories you publish on your column. I’m sure this won’t amount to much for most Newsvine contributors but you can expect some authors to make some real cash (the author receives 90% of the money from the ads that show up on their stories in their column – Newsvine gets 10%). Speaking of columns, here is Shannon’s.
Want to see Newsvine’s 60 second tour? Sure, now I tell you! Hey, you came here to read me didn’t you?
P.P.S. Hey Shannon, the race is now on to increase our Vinacity. See you at the finish line.
Update Two things. First, it would be quite ironic, but now that we’re no longer in the Greenhouse, we don’t appear to be anywhere. Even areas where there wouldn’t appear to be ANY competition for our stories. Perhaps all our commenting, publishing, and voting DID get us in the dog house? Only time, and an even greater scouring of Newsvine help, will tell. Next, I had a thought for a feature. Just as we can vote on stories and comments, wouldn’t it be great if we could vote on specific written passages of a story? What a tremendous help it would be to the author to understand how their piece was received, was relevant, or which parts packed the most punch? It would be similarly useful to all Newsvine readers to see what parts of a story were considered to be of the highest import, or quality. It could work much like the Seed feature. The user would highlight the text that they wanted to vote on, or promote, and then hit a ratings or voting button. You could also place a visual indicator in the stories to show hot spots of the story. I’d call this feature ‘passages.’ There you go Mike, your next cool Newsvine feature.
Update September 5, 2006
The day after I wrote my last update my stories started making it out on the vine. Seems like it was probably just a database refresh ‘thang.’ Not only that, but I’m a ‘Featured Writer’ on the home page today and I’m also featured on the sports section.
I want to give a shout out to Ronald Lewis, who I found via way of Newsvine, for introducing me to Gabcast. Here’s Ronald’s Gabcast channel if you want to have a listen. This is my fist podcast using their service and so far, so good. I had no trouble setting up a channel, posting this podcast using their phone podcasting tool or publishing it on my blog. I’m interested to try their conference calling feature to see how reliable it is. Given that it’s a paid service, and I won’t have to use my phone’s three-way calling feature to conduct interviews as I’ve done with Odeo, I suspect it will be more reliable to use. The conference call service gives you 30 free minutes to try it, after which it is paid, which seems like a fair shake Gabcast’s part.
I’ve introduced you to some of my good and bad experiences using Odeo to podcsat with over the phone. I came across another podcasting tool that now has support for both phone recording and wordpress. So, here’s a test post featuring a podcast from Gabfest that talks about some of their new features, including the addition of WordPress support.
After Shannon and I first in Phoenix we met up in New York City and we have many wonderful memories from our trip there. So much so, that we returned to New York to get married in the same Hotel, The Royalton, that we originally stayed at.
Of course we had occasion to eat at some excellent restaurants during our stay and one of them was Rosa Mexicano, which was recommended to us by the staff at the Royalton (their tips on clubs weren’t as good). We’ve returned there for dinner during each of our return trips – no trip to NYC would be complete without a stop there which may seem odd since it’s a Mexican Restaurant.
You can imagine that we were delighted to learn that Rosa Mexicano just opened up a new location close by in Palm Beach Gardens at Downtown at the Gardens. We made our first reservation for this past Saturday, to celebrate Shannon’s new job, just a week after their grand opening here.
Needless to say, it’s still a bit tough to get a reservation (ours was for 9:30PM). We arrived and were seated right away and were treated to the same amazing food and great service that we’ve experienced in NYC. If you haven’t been, you should try their tableside prepared Guacamole – it’s top notch, and the experience of watching them make everything on the cart right next to you, definitely adds to the experience.
Don’t pass up their signature PomegranateMargarita either – it’s excellent. We’d also highly recommend the Tequila Flights that let you try a selection of three different Tequila’s from their extensive selection. If you’re not a Tequila drinker, you either don’t like to drink, or you haven’t had good Tequila. Well, that may be overstating the case, but Shannon and I are biased. It’s one of those drinks where the bad stuff is really bad, and the good stuff is amazing. The top shelf Tequila’s are all Anejo’s (aged) and are made from 100% Blue Agave Cactus from Mexico. In any event, you’ll want to have orange slices with your Tequila (never limes) as it brings out the natural orange flavor of Tequila’s (especially the Anejo sipping Tequila’s). A nice twist that our waiter recommened is to sprinkle some chili powder on the oranges. We’d never heard of this, and we both agreed that it was an excellent addition. Not only that, but they make a version of Sangria at Rosa Mexicano called Sangrita that has a dash of chili powder in it. Amazing! Rosa often serves these as chasers with their Tequila flights.
For our entrees we enjoyed their chicken Enchiladas and Filet Mignon with mushrooms – both were excellent.
There was one disappointment – the décor. The location in NYC is authentic and intimate, the Palm Beach Gardens location is barn like, though we still enjoyed their wall of blue which is the only internal highlight. Well OK, the bar’s nice.
If you haven’t gone, make your reservation and tell them that Julio sent you.
p.s. It was an odd and pleasant experience to run into a group of our old neighbors from when we lived on Westerminter Rd, not far from El Cid, where we just moved back to in West Palm Beach. The best part is that Shannon and I had just had hair cuts earlier that day and we were both sporting radically shorter coifs. When our neighbor Bill, husband of Shannon’s friend and former co-worker Lisa, ambled up to our table we were very much amused that Bill didn’t recognize me at all! He extended his hand, a glint in his eye as he sized up Shannon’s new catch, and introduced himself to me. I just smiled, shook his hand, and said Hi Bill! Oh man, we had fun with that one.
I pass this Church each day at least twice as I walk the dogs or go for a run along the Intracoastal Waterway here in downtown West Palm. At last, the Unity Church has revealed their true colors as a cult (witness the picture on the left).
It took them two days to figure out what they were advertising to the multitudes passing them by each day. I like the authentic one on the left a lot more.
The San Jose Mercury News published a good story on privacy recently related to what information the major search engines track when you use their sites.
Searching the internet is so ingrained and seemingly temporary that it’s hard to get it in your head that someone is watching what you are doing. Did you know that major search engines like Google have ticker-type displays showing the live top searches scrolling across their lunch room walls? Things like that, and all the news in the last few months about search engine data being subpoenaed by the U.S. government is starting to wake consumers up about this threat to their privacy.
I came across this picture of my Dad Lorenz recently (he’s the one on the left) taken outside of his college building where he taught at the West Australian Institute of Technology (now John Curtain University as I understand it).
This one features Dad and one of his long time friends Brian (white hair on right). The other gent is familiar but I can’t place his name. Dad, a little help here? In any event, it was a really nice memory of Dad and the good times I had hanging out with him at his college when I was a wee lad. I ran my skateboard all over that school! I have always had a hard time bringing my kids to work but dad never seemed to mind even though I made a nuisance of myself. I have to really thank you for that dad. Since you let me go with you so often it is a wonderful series of memories that I have from that time and not just a single event and it is something I always look back on fondly about. Good on ya Mate!
Hat tip to Shannon for finding this and for Outsidthebeltway for publishing it in the first place. I understand that they’re already taken this one down. How sad.
I was looking through Good Morning Silicon Valley just yesterday (nice work as always John P and John M). In any event, I thought this was a great quote and wanted to share it here.
“Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.” — Tim Berners-Lee says there’s no need to rename something once you start to understand it
I gave the new Flock browser a multi-day trial and sadly, I have to kick it to the curb. The developers are on the right track and once they have the speed and functionality improved I’m likely to be a big fan. For now, I’ve done my duty and sent them my feedback in three separate support cases where I encountered browser crashes, a consistent and significant browser lag problem (only on my Mac, not my PC) and the remainder of my wish list for improved functionality.
The functionality improvements that I would need to see in order to use Flock include:
support for posting to multiple blogs (this was wrong on my part – my apologies)
editing blog posts (not just publishing new posts) (there is a workaround for this according to an e-mail I received from support)
ability to save a draft post TO your blog vs. the current options to either publish to your blog or save locally
HTML preview function (similar to Writely or the control panel of WordPress)
Everything else I tried worked well and I really like the interface design, integrated toolset and the nice RSS reader. I’m sure that by the time the developers make it around to the 1.0 release it will be really solid. For now, my Mac has NO lag issues running Firefox, Camino or Safari so I can’t accept that this is anything other than a Flock issue.
Speed update 8/31/06. I tried using Flock again today and found the same dissapointing speed on the Mac. Still running smoothly on the PC.
We’ve lurked there since it went live earlier this year but now we’re taking the time to get involved.
Why didn’t they just call it the dog house? The message is clear, the more you interact and use ALL of the Newsvine features, the faster you climb the Greenhouse leaderboard and the quicker you get out. Not a bad way to teach people how to use the tools either. People on the top of the page are the closest to graduating to the general community. You’ll be shocked to learn that Shannon took this as our latest venue to compete. I started out way ahead of Shannon but within a day she was nipping at my heals in the Greenhouse, despite my head start. Very early this morning, while Shannon was sleeping, I staggered (careened even) down the halls of the vine, voting, seeding, commenting and even posting to see if I could push myself out of the Greenhouse. But, try as I might, I couldn’t get into the number one position – never mind out onto the vine. Not only that, while Shannon was sleeping, my voting for her stories inched her up a couple of spots (I’m taking full credit) so that we were right next to each other – with me on top, just as it should be. 
I took the screen shot shown above because I didn’t know how long it would stay that way. Good thing, because this morning when I logged in, you couldn’t find either of us in the Greenhouse. I guess this means that we’re bona fide members of the community now. It feels a little like graduating from Kindergarten and moving into grade school, sad, terrifying, and exciting all at the same time.
