AaronFreedman.com

Most of you know about digg, the online peer-production news site. I’ve been using digg for well over a month now, and until today I’ve though that it was the best peer-production news site out there. Boy, was I wrong. I figured this out today when I went to see the SEOmoz’s 2006 Web 2.0 Awards, which pick the best Web 2.0 site in a certain category based on the number of peer nominations. While browsing the categories, I noticed the winners of the peer-production news category. Instead of seeing digg in first place, which I expected, I saw a site called Newsvine. Digg had made it to second place, yet this Newsvine site and somehow ousted digg in this category. This made me very interested, so I decided to check out Newsvine. After briefly exploring some of the site, I decided to join, which is of course free, to try out all of the features it has to offer. Within 30 minutes, I became obsessed. somehow, this little site had become even better than digg in my opinion, even though digg is still vastly more popular. Here are some of the features that showed me why:

Technorati Tags: news, peear-production, newsvine, articles, stories, digg, Web 2.0

1. A wide range of topics: Just to start off, Newsvine has a wide variety of topics that range from politics to technology, to just plain weird news. Digg, on the other hand, only has technology related stories. Newsvine’s wider variety of stories makes it seem more like a real news site, like The New York Times or Google News. And even people who aren’t even interested in technology can use Newsvine because it’s topics of news stories have such a wide range.

2. The Wire and The Vine: Newsvine has two different types of stories, called “The Wire” and “The Vine.” The Wire consists of stories taken automatically and unedited from The Associated Press and ESPN. The Vine consists of stories either written by users on their columns (see #5), or submitted by them. The fact that Newsvine has stories from reputable news organizations makes it seem more like Google News, and gives the site more credibility. Digg, on the other hand, has only user-submited stories, so the validity if articles can be debated. Digg also doesn’t have user-writen stories like Newsvine, but I’ll get to that later.

3. Categories, tags, regions, and the Watchlist: All the news on Newsvine is organized into tags and categories. Categories are kind of like umbrella groups that can’t be deleted or created by normal users. The categories on Newsvine are World, U.S., Sports, Politics, Tech, Entertainment, Science, Business, Health, and Odd News. On the page for each category are the latest Wire and Vine news stories, organized by either rank (similar to digging stories on digg) or by “raw,” the top contributors for the category, and the top writers for it too. But categories aren’t the only way stories are organized on Newsvine. Tags, which are little keywords added by users to different things, are used on Newsvine. You probably already know about tags from sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, and Newsvine uses them in a very similar way. When a story on Newsvine is submitted, the writer tags it with certain tags. For example, a story on cocaine being smuggled into Virgin Mary statues has been tagged with brooklyn, catholicism, cocaine, drugs, houston, mexico, new-york, odd-news, and virgin-mary. this means that if you do a search on Newsvine for anyone of these tags, this story will come up. Tags can also be used in conjunction with categories. For example, I can see all stories tagged with “apple” within the category of technology. Wire stories are also tagged, but this is done automatically, so it’s not the same as user tagged stories. Another way tags are used is ins something called regions. Regions are geographic areas, mainly cities and countries, that have their own pages and are tags for stories. For example, the cociane in the Virgin Mary article is tagged with “new-york.” This means that in addition to being able to find this article in a tag search for New York, you will also be able to find it on the region homepage for New York, which is its own subdomain and has its own categories. And now the Watchlist. The Watchlist is your own personal, well, watchlist which contains all the tags/categories/regions that you want to add to it, simply by clicking the “watch” button on the appropriate page, with each of the tags/categories/regions on the watchlist displaying the number of unread stories for each. Your watchlist has its own page, which anyone can visit that has articles from all the tags/categgories/regions that you put on it. Your watchlist also has its own RSS feeds for either Wire, Vine, or both, as do all tags/categories/regions.

4. Live Chat: Live Chat is a nifty feature on each article the allows users to have an IM-like chat about a news story, right in tehir web browser. THis is a big improvement over traditional commenting, which is also used in Newsvine, that is the only commenting method on sites such as digg. The live chat feature re-enforces the name Newsvine, because it is more “alive” than traditional chats.

5. Your Column: The column is by far the biggest feature of Newsvine. Each user has their own “column,” which is a page that has all the articles that they’ve submitted, or “seeded,” and is also a place for users to write their own articles. This is a big deal, being that digg and Slashdot allow user-submitted stories only. When you write your own article, you can have its submitted to a category and attach tags to it, in addition to it appearing on your column. Your column also has its own categories and tags, which is helpful for other users browsing it when you have a lot of stories on it. Your column also displays your personal profile and a contact page for people to contact you without knowing your e-mail address.

These are the five biggest things about Newsvine that stood out to me. There are other things, like The Greenhouse and implanting RSS feeds from Newsvine into your blog, but these thinsg were what really got me hooked on Newsvine and will hopefully get you hooked to.