Dave Chappelle on Newsvine!

Something happened on Newsvine’s opening day that really validated to us where this whole project is going. It had nothing to do with the traffic, the kind reviews, or the reports about us being acquired. It was a simple post by Newsvine member Corey Spring.

Corey is a senior at Thee Ohio State University, and when he’s not partying it up with the Buckeye coeds, he works at the local college TV station. It so happens that Corey was invited to Dayton, Ohio for the premiere of Dave Chappelle’s new movie “Block Party”.

Corey somehow managed to steal Chappelle away for a few minutes and conducted an impromptu interview with him. Then he posted the interview to Newsvine, tagged it accordingly, and bam, an exclusive Dave Chappelle interview for the world to see.

It doesn’t stop there though. Immediately upon posting, the Newsvine Doppelganger™ kicked in and automatically added a link to an Associated Press story from that same day about Dave Chappelle’s dispute with Comedy Central. So now the AP story is linked from the bottom of Corey’s interview, and Corey’s interview is linked from the bottom of the AP story.

Some hard-core citizen journalist types have asked us why we use Associated Press stories at all. There are hundreds of reasons, but this is a perfect example. You can read that Dave Chappelle AP story on many other popular news sites, but only on Newsvine would you spontaneously discover Corey’s interview in the course of reading it. That is pretty magical to me. People have also questioned whether “citizens” are qualified, in general, to be journalists. Well this is a textbook example of the concept in action. Journalism doesn’t always mean investigating scandals in the White House. Sometimes it’s simply about distilling stories from everyday life.

Make sure to head on over to Corey’s column and add him to your watchlist today. As soon as we turn on support for audio, polls, and other rich elements, these sorts of interviews will only get better.

Some other people to watch as well:

Carl Howe — Carl is considered by many as the Dean of the Vine, posting well-organized thoughts about marketing, technology, and where new media is going.

John Strubel — Exclusive interviews from Major League Baseball Spring Training and other excellent sports-related commentary.

The Anna Log — Benevolent lightning rod and perpetual catalyst for interesting political discussions on the Vine.

Mike Dojc — Sports and entertainment news from a guy who knows his stuff. Mike’s written for Maxim, Nike, The Toronto Star and many other properties.

Gary Goldhammer — Gary unique perspectives on the direction of new media come from 17 years of experience in journalism, public relations, and marketing.

Dave Sheldon — Dave’s day job as an ESPN Hockey analyst and play-by-play guy gives him an inside perspective into the sports world.

Salam Pax — Salam is known to many as “that famous Iraqi blogger” for his excellent first-hand reporting during the Iraqi invasion.

Newsvine Launches

After eight weeks of testing in private beta, Newsvine is now live to the world. It’s been an extremely productive couple of months, with countless enhancements and feature additions making their way onto the site almost every day.

The decision when to release to the world was a tough one for us. The site has come so far in its short existence, and yet, we feel we still have so far to go. Things are never finished around here, but that’s a good thing. By continuing to listen and react to the needs of the community, the Newsvine team is determined to make this site what it has always promised to be: a perfectly different, perfectly efficient way to read, write, and discuss the news.

We’d like to send out a huge thank you to all members of the alpha and the beta for taking the time to put Newsvine through its motions. When you build a large-scale news media site and an accompanying content management system from scratch, there’s simply no way to forecast what issues and circumstances will come up until a diverse group of people put it to everyday use. So for all 30,000+ people who made their way into the beta during the last several weeks, THANK YOU! A huge thanks also goes to Mike Slade, Nick Hanauer, and the rest of the crew at Second Avenue Partners who have not only provided us with the financial support to build Newsvine but also the industry expertise to help us build the best service we can possibly build.

So where are we with regards to features at launch? Let’s a quick look at the some of the features that made it in for launch, as well as the things the five of us will be working on for the next few months:

Already Live

The Fastest Wire News on the Web

Because there is no editor sitting between our newswires and the live site, news makes its way onto Newsvine faster than any site on the web. In some cases, we’ve beaten major news sites by hours on very important stories. The news mix is continuously being adjusted over here so we’re still working out some kinks, but one thing we know is we’re extremely fast.

500+ Regions Around the World

Newsvine now covers over 500 regions around the world… including Antarctica! While we’re just beginning to scratch the surface with international coverage, it’s now fully possible to submit content from all around the world and have it appear in its appropriate location. Not only that, but all news on the site is displayed in your local time zone, whether it be Pacific, Eastern, or Ulaanbaatar time. We have big plans for both expanding the breadth of our regional coverage as well as drilling down to the “micro-location” level… or neighborhoods. Stay tuned.

Easy Writing and Seeding

Over the last several weeks, we’ve added features like spellchecking, autosave, and inline previewing to our authoring tools while making them simpler at the same time. The goal at Newsvine is for people who’ve never published on the web before to easily hop right on and start writing. Additionally, we’ve made it possible for people to maintain their own columns simply by saving interesting news stories (seeding). The goal is to get people involved in any way they wish.

Newsvine Doppelganger™

The Newsvine Doppelganger™ is a handsome beast capable of determining the similarity of articles hosted anywhere in the world. For instance, if someone were to write an original Newsvine article on a particular incident in Iraq, Newsvine would instantly know if similar Associated Press stories were available anywhere on the site, or even external stories seeded from other sites like CNN or the BBC. The goal here is the automated clustered of similar information and the ability to point readers in the direction of the most lively and informative conversations.

Flexible, Usable Navigation

Searching on Newsvine is as easy as typing a term into the URL bar. “newsvine.com/sports” gives you all sports stories on the site. “strubel.newsvine.com/sports” gives you all sports stories by John Strubel. “seattle.newsvine.com” gives you all stories from the Seattle region.

Powerful moderation tools

We now have the ability to endorse and report every piece of content on the site. Whether article, seed, or comment, all users are now directly accountable for what they submit. We’re happy to say that during the private beta, system abuse was squashed quickly and, in most cases, automatically. The reputation and reporting system at Newsvine will continue to evolve every day as we react to new circumstances around the site. As in the case with any community, abuse will occur, but via a combination of automated tools and responsible community oversight, we expect these incidents to remain under control.

Things on the Radar

Depth of Content, Especially in Sports

Within a short period of time, you’ll see certain sections on the site receive their own special treatment depending on what sort of information needs to be displayed. For instance, in the sports section, we’ll have team navigation, live scoreboards, and all of the other things you’d expect to see on a sports site. In the business section, you’ll see stocks. We’ve built the system very wide, and now it’s time to go deep.

Advertising

One of the founding philosophies of Newsvine is that where users put value into the site, they should receive value in return. For this reason, we offer the most generous advertising split in the business to those who contribute in good faith. We are in the midst of settling the details of our ad agreement, from a sales and technology side, so expect ads to go live within several weeks. Until the system is ready and tested, however, the site will remain ad-free.

Newsvine Guilds

One of the most heavily requested features has been group functionality, and through a series of articles written by the prolific Mykola Bilokonsky, we have begun to address this opportunity. There is nothing to show publicly at this stage, but rest assured, guilds are high on the radar.

Chat Lobby and Enhancements

Chat itself actually works pretty well, but right now initiating chats is a bit counterintuitive. If you hop in an empty room, others will usually enter within 3 or 4 minutes, but most people don’t think to do this. For this reason, we’ll be working on a dedicated chat lobby for people to get together with as little guesswork as possible.

Better Diversification of Topics on the Front Page

As many users have noticed, the front page of Newsvine can be tech-heavy and sports-heavy at times. Expect to see a concerted effort to keep the news mix as even as possible in the future.

Writer Discovery and Cultivation

During the private beta, we’ve just let writers discover Newsvine on their own. We haven’t advertised or made any other concerted efforts to get people on board. It is our hope that once the site is available for public viewing more and more people with interesting things to say will come on board and start writing. We do, however, need to step up our efforts in helping fill niche subjects and finding the best independent voices. The best way you can help is to invite friends and help spread the word.

Feature-Rich Columns

Right now, a column is simply a list of articles you’ve written and links you’ve seeded. This is nice and simple, but users have indicated they’d like the ability to add all sorts of modules to further personalize their pages. Now, we’re not talking MySpace-style auto-play music, tiled backgrounds, anything goes, stuff… obviously… but there are a wealth of additions we plan on making which will allow users to express themselves in other, creative ways.

And off we go…

So there you have it. We’re live. It’s been a great few months so far, and we look forward to a lasting relationship with the people who really make this site work… the Newsvine community.

Lessons From The Roundabout SEO Test

My favorite comedian of all time, the late great Mitch Hedberg, once told a joke about what he called “The Roundabout AIDS test.” Click Mitch’s mouth below to hear it:

While obviously not meant in any serious manner, the joke reminds me of my attitude towards SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”. A lot of people spend an inordinate amount of time making sure all of their pages are specifically geared towards achieving a high ranking on Google. While I understand the business objectives of such an obsession, I find my own attitude towards SEO much more apathetic. I’m a lot more interested in how many people subscribe to Mike Industries than how many people typed in something like “expiring domain” and somehow ended up at my site.

So for that reason, my SEO activity is limited to my own little “Roundabout SEO Test”, which I perform a few times a year. It’s a very simple test and takes only a few seconds to execute. Here is the procedure:

1. Go to google.com.

2. Type in “mike”.

3. Hit return.

4. Take note of how high or low Mike Industries is on the list of results.

That’s it.

Yes, it seems a little narcissistic, and yes, it’s not a true measure of how well each page on this site is optimized for search engines, but it’s a general indication of how well or poorly this blog is doing and that’s really all I’m interested in.

In running this Roundabout SEO Test since creating Mike Industries last year, I’ve seen my ranking among Mikes climb from in the thousands, to in the hundreds, to the top 50, to the top twenty, and most recently to number 5.

Number 5 is great and I’m totally cool with it considering that my parents were unoriginal enough to christen me with the most popular name in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but now that the list of “competitors” is down to 4, I thought I’d take a close look at why the pecking order on Google is the way it is. In other words, what are the factors which most affect search results in the real world?
Read more…

The Proof is in the People

Forecasting the next big thing on the web seems to be the sport of the season these days. Each quarter, new companies launch and put themselves at the mercy of the blogosphere and the press with the hopes of being the next media darling.

But is being a media darling a good indicator of how well a new business will do? Not necessarily. During a recent meeting at Newsvine, Nick Hanauer said something to the team which I believe deserves some further thought:

“Almost every time a great idea is first presented, people tend to reject it.”

It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s often times true. An entrepreneur who always thinks along the lines of everyone else will produce a product or service just like everyone else’s. That’s usually a bad thing.

So it is with raised brow that I watch the plucking of the Gather.com feathers by seemingly every single tech pundit on the interweb. I had never really checked out Gather before two weeks ago when a couple of reporters asked me about the company, but this week seems to be the week to pass judgement on them. I think the site, just like all sites, has a mix of good and bad, but the only way to determine if it will be successful in the end is to see how fast they react to their users and how nimble they are at running their business. I think a lot of the press and blogosphere are just expressing doubt about whether having 46 people on staff helps or hurts this objective.

Even though Newsvine is not a competitor of Gather, I do admit that I feel very fortunate (and humbled) to have most of the press, the blogosphere, and the public writing so positively about us right now. I’d like to think it’s because we have the beginnings of a great new way to get your news, and that we’re all nice people over here, but you never know. I think the Gather team is probably a bunch of nice people as well, but for some reason, people aren’t taking too kindly to what they’re presenting. My advice to Gather is to not let the cynics get you too low and not let the praise get you too high. We are in a constant state of improvement over here, regardless of the weather, and I think that’s the only thing that matters for any company moving forward.

I also feel very fortunate to have a company of five right now. We may hire a couple/few more people over the next several months, but the small footprint lets us improve the site daily and operate with minimal overhead. We have so many plans for new features… it’s just that none of them require blowing the staff out to old media proportions.

Those are words I may very well eat (and eat happily), but as of now, it behooves us, and any pre-money company to stay as small as possible until there are necessary reasons to spend more capital. Now, Gather may have found those reasons and others just aren’t smart enough to see them yet, or they’re just aggressively developing their company and aiming really high. Both of those can turn out quite well.

As for us, we’re just going to keep learning from our users and admitting we only know half of what we think we know. The moment you think you understand everything about the market you’re entering is the moment you exit it.

I’d like to close with a quote from an e-mail we received just a few hours ago from a Newsvine user:

“What if we want to contribute our ad earnings back to the site once the ads start appearing?”

It’s this sort of customer sentiment and goodwill that keeps us going every day. We realize there will eventually be bumps in the road with media coverage of Newsvine, but the only measuring stick we’re paying attention to right now is user opinion. We think we’re on to something, and to us, the proof is in the people.