I was invited to the beta of Newsvine, an extremely interesting and fully-featured blog community.

The basic concept is to harness the swarmocracy of infovores and put it to work. Users are given the ability to vote on the importance of any stories that they read, either from syndicated news sources, users posts, or 'seeds' -- references to stories or posts outside Newswire. This screenshot is a 'seed' that I created:

The most popular stories work their way to the top, like the model at Always-On-Network, which is the community that this is most likely to be compared to.

I created a post in my new blog in only a few seconds, and fooled with the embedded chat rooms, which is an idea that I think is long overdue. However, since I had no one visiting the post, I was merely talking to myself. But the notion has real merit in a situation with more readers.

As I suggest in the post at Newsvine, I was worried about the business model. Do Newsvine users own their posts? Are the going to get a share of the action? So I went and looked at the user agreement:

[from Newsvine - Newsvine User Agreement] User Content

By transmitting or submitting User Content to the Site, you hereby (a) grant Newsvine a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual and fully sublicensable and transferable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, distribute, publish, create derivative works from and publicly display and perform such User Content throughout the universe in any media, now known or hereafter devised; (b)grant Newsvine, its affiliates and sublicensees the right to use the name, identifier, or any portion thereof, submitted in connection with such User Content, if they so choose. You represent and warrant that (i)such User Content is either original to you, or all third party rights have been fully cleared for use as contemplated by this Agreement; (ii)the User Content does and will not, in any way, violate or breach any of the terms of this Agreement or the Code of Conduct, and (iii)Newsvine shall not in any circumstance be required to pay or incur any sums to any person or entity as a result of its use or exploitation of the User Content unless otherwise agreed by Newsvine.

Without limiting the foregoing, Newsvine reserves the right to use the User Content as it deems appropriate, including, without limitation, deleting, editing, modifying, rejecting, or refusing to post it. Your submission of User Content is subject to the terms our Code of Conduct. Newsvine may, but is under no obligation to, offer you any payment for User Content that you submit or the opportunity to edit, delete or otherwise modify User Content once the it has been submitted to Newsvine. Newsvine shall have no duty to attribute authorship of User Content to you, and shall not be obligated to enforce any form of attribution by third parties.

If it is determined that you retain moral rights (including rights of attribution or integrity) in the User Content, you hereby declare that (a) you do not require that any personally identifying information be used in connection with the User Content, or any derivative works of or upgrades or updates thereto; (b) you have no objection to the publication, use, modification, deletion and exploitation of the User Content by Newsvine or its licensees, successors and assigns; (c) you forever waive and agree not to claim or assert any entitlement to any and all moral rights of an author in any of the User Content; and (d) you forever release Newsvine, and its licensees, successors and assigns, from any claims that you could otherwise assert against Newsvine by virtue of any such moral rights.

Hmmm. Seems fairly draconiam. They have rights to use everything, for ever, and the right to censor you or block you altogether. But that might be acceptable if they are paying me. Are they? It looks like they are:

[from Newsvine - Newsvine User Agreement] Advertising Payments

Advertising Revenue. Our services may permit registered users to post User Content to a portion of our Site that is identifiable by a third level domain name selected by the user (username.newsvine.com) called a "Subdomain". [this is the user's blog, although not named as such] As with other areas of our Site, we may post advertisements in the Subdomain ("Ads"). In the event that we post Ads of a third party to a user's Subdomain, we will pay users as follows:

• ninety percent (90%) of the Net Advertising Revenue derived from a Subdomain that we receive from third parties (the "User Earnings") will be paid to the registered user of that Subdomain;
• ten percent (10%) of the Net Advertising Revenue (the "Referral Earnings") will be paid to the registered user (if any) that the Subdomain's user listed at registration or that we have otherwise identified as the party that referred the Subdomain's user when the account was set up with Newsvine.

In the event that a referring party is not identified, Newsvine will retain the Referral Earnings. For purposes of this User Agreement, "Net Advertising Revenue" means (a) the amount actually collected by Newsvine from a third party for each page view or impression of an Ad, (b) less any allocated overhead costs, commissions, fees paid to third parties, taxes, bad debt, returns, discounts, royalties, credits, and any other costs and expenses arising from the sale and placement of such Ads.

Payment Terms and Conditions. Within 45 days of a user's request, we will pay the User Earnings and Referral Earnings that have accrued to a user's account for any period in excess of 30 days. In other words, a user is not eligible to receive payments for an Ad displayed in a Subdomain until at least 30 days follows the display of the Ad and we receive payment from the advertiser for that Ad. Further, we shall have no obligation to pay User Earnings or Referral Earnings until and unless such earnings exceed $10 in the aggregate. All payments will be made in U.S. dollars by PayPal where possible or otherwise by check or other method selected by us. Checks will not be issued for amounts less that $50. As a condition of payment, you agree that if you fail to cash any check or otherwise collect any amount payable to you within one hundred eighty (180) days of the date payable, then our obligation to pay such amount shall be void and such amounts shall vest in Newsvine. You should regularly access and review your account to monitor accrued and payable amounts.

Only active user accounts are eligible to receive payments. If a user does not log in to his or her account for a year or more, the user account will be terminated and any accrued earnings will be forfeited. If a user terminates his or her account for any reason or if we terminate the account for cause (including violations of this User Agreement or our Code of Conduct), any accrued earnings that the user has not yet redeemed or requested for redemption will be forfeited. Once an account is terminated, any correlation between the terminated user account and any other existing user account is terminated so no further Referral Earnings will be paid.

No Guarantee. Newsvine does not guarantee that any user will receive any minimum level of payment as a result of the placement of Ads on our Site. Newsvine has sole discretion as to the selection and placement of all Ads and the look and feel of the Site, including any Subdomain. Earnings are paid as an incentive for the continued use of our Site and are not in consideration for the submission of any User Content. We reserve the right to add, remove, modify, rename, move, delete or discontinue the Subdomain or any Materials or User Content therein at any time in our sole discretion. We further reserve the right to change or discontinue the payment of Earnings or Referral Earnings at any time. Your continued use of our Site and maintenance of an account with us after any such change will constitute your acceptance of the new terms. In the event that you do not agree to such change, your sole and exclusive remedy is to cease using the Site and to terminate your account with us. Any such termination will not alter any of our rights under this User Agreement, including our license rights described above.

All of a sudden it looks a little more interesting. If I post within Newsvine, and thousands of people a day come to my site, I could potentially get 90% of the ad revenue. Just as important, it's a referral game: if I bring others into the fold, I make 10% of their ad revenue (if I read the legalese correctly).

A fully featured, web 2.0 era blogging community that includes reputation, ranking, real-time chat, tagging, and 'seeding', on top of a business model that encourages people to add their value to the swarm and to bring others in... looks like it is hitting many of the important buttons.

The challenges for Newsvine?

1. The cost of transitioning if you are already blogging 'in the wild' on Typepad or Wordpress -- in my case, I have thousands of posts that I don't want to abandon. They would have to develop an import capability to convince others like me to come inside.


2. The possibility of censorship -- a real problem.


3. Changing people's way of doing things -- I buy in on the unified field theory of active readering, where you read, tag, bookmark, and post all in one unbroken context, but this is one of those cases where you have to 'move' into the community to get the benefits it offers, even while you are already invested in the community outside Newsvines walls.

[An interesting idea occurs to me: what if Newsvine were willing to provide a context in which blog networks could operate as independent companies? They would in essence be acting as a landlord and business partner, since they would be driving the marketing and ad network side of things, and then the blog networks could simply leverage their blogging and develop an independent brand identity under the Newsvine tent. They would have to modify things somewhat, and perhaps provide some specific tools to support the networks, like branding of networked blogs, but otherwise it would assist the growing number of blog networks that are springing up on all sides.]

At any rate, I am going to watch Newsvine closely. I have come to really like the tech.memeorandum style of blog 'piling on' although I do agree with Nicholas Carr's recent criticism of the too tight and too narrow selections of stories there. Shouldn't there be hundreds of tech stories of interest, not just a dozen or so? But the fact that memeorandum readers can't rate what they are reading explicitly is a real flaw, from my perspective. So, I favor the Newsvine model in that regard, although the contributors at memeorandum are those with big reputations, and no small fry... which has both positive and negative characteristics.

This then may turn out to be a question of democratic and open sourcing versus autocratic and closed. On one side, we have memeorandum, Corante Hubs, and other solutions that start with a roster of highly successful writers and then use a closed algorithm or editorial decisions to determine what's hot or not, while on the other side we will see Newsvine and other swarm-based communities, where everyone -- in principle -- starts on an equal footing and everyone -- before the karma gets baked in -- has an equal voice in deciding what's interesting or not. The power laws suggest that relatively soon it might not matter, since karma will accrue, and the best writers will rise to the top. But when the system is open, and is based on collective decision making, the results are likely to not only be different, but better.