On Newsvine, Inc.
December 6th, 2005
Newsvine was conceived by my buddy Mike and I on a dive trip to the Bahamas. Upon returning, we put the concept to paper with several of his co-workers from ESPN/Disney Internet Group. Several months later we incorporated and set the wheels in motion.
Basically, Newsvine.com is a way for the average citizen to gain readership and to be on an even footing with professionals from the mainstream media. It is also a way for journalists and writers to publish their material on the web without the constraints of deadlines and editors. Contributions by all users are ranked by the community based on popularity and usefullness, rather than by an editor sitting in an armchair somewhere. Every person has his/her own domain at Newsvine.com and can write about whatever they want, whenever they want. The icing on the cake is that Newsvine is not only free, but you keep 90% of the earnings generated by ad revenue from your own column. I won’t get into all the other cool features our site employs here, but you can read more about us in the press via the links below.
Currently, we are in private beta, with access given to users on an invitation basis. After about 2 weeks of being in the press, we’ve had over 6000 people sign up to take part in the private testing of the site. We’ll be letting people in on a rolling basis over the next month or so. Our public launch will be in about a month or two, depending on how things go. So far, we’re having great feedback and have been knocking out the bugs like Raid.
Since I’m taking a departure from talking about all things scuba, I’ll be starting a new category on this blog to detail things about The Vine as things progress. I’ll likely not be going into as much detail as Mike does on his design and technology focused blog, but you’ll get a few interesting tidbits here and there when I can pull myself out of the water to give you the scoop. These posts will be purely from a personal perspective. All official information released by the company will be posted by us on the Newsvine Blog. If you’re solely interested in news from me about Newsvine and not the scuba stuff, you can always subscribe to this feed.
For you scuba fanatics, sorry for the delay, but I’ll have some great gear reviews up soon on some cool stuff I’ve been busily using and abusing.
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