The news that MSNBC has bought Newsvine is a very big deal in the new media world. MSNBC.com has done a lot of excellent online journalism over the years, and pulling Newsvine under its wing make perfect sense.
Now we need to see the experiment taken to a more logical conclusion, because Newsvine and its competitors are getting only part of this right — and a company with deep pockets could take it further.
Along with Digg and Reddit and others, Newsvine is one of the sites that has led the way in the voting-on-news arena. But popularity is an extremely crude tool when it comes to understanding quality, better than nothing but not much better.
They and the host of competitors out there need to add reputation to the mix. Whoever gets this right will win, big, and so will the rest of us as we move toward seriously useful community vetting of news and information. We’re not even close yet.
on Oct 8th, 2007 at 4:19 am
Agreed. Voting can be quite crude. Many sites become populist forgetting about the quality of articles and only considering the gamble. This needs to be cracked.