Metagasm: A Look at Today's Newsvine Announcement

Yes, yes - writing about meta on newsvine is so 2006. I know.

Still, newsvine fanboy that I am, I'm going to take a few minutes here to jot down some thoughts about today's big - if vague - announcement. We got various news, things are going well for the team, Calvin gets to sleep three nights a week and they feed Mark now, etc etc etc whatever.

At the end we get this big dump:

So what's on tap for 2008 so far? Well, we can't give away all the details just yet, but you can expect the following features and improvements, as well as several pleasant surprises coming your way:

* New customizable and extensible user columns
* Completely new public and private groups
* Journalism Awards
* Vastly extended user profile pages
* Newsvine Assignment Desk
* A new take on message boards
* Video
* New ways of visualizing news stories within your social chain
* Writer outreach programs
* Community moderators
* Discussion clubs
* NCAA Tournament Pick 'Em

... and of course a better, easier-to-use Help section to make sense of it all!

This is the interesting part to me. I've been here since 11/05 if you believe my datestamp (you shouldn't, but that's when I signed up I guess) and this is the first time we've ever just had a big public dump of planned features. Normally they are as stingy with their dev plans as Adam is with social niceties, so this is exciting.

So let's take a look at what these ideas might mean. Please note I am strictly speculating here, and my interest is purely as a user and - I'll use the term - fan of this site.

Customizable and Extensible User Columns

This is something we've all almost given up asking for. I for one look forward to the ability to develop a slightly more comprehensive brand for myself on the internet with newsvine as a hub - I'd like the ability to customize my layout a bit more, separate clipped content from my own content, create sticky posts, perhaps display RSS feeds from my blog, etc etc etc. Greater user control over what people see at our columns is, I think, key - it's the best way to let really creative voices stand apart.

Group Revamp

Nobody was more excited than I was when groups finally rolled out 13 months ago, but nobody has been a more vocal critic of their current implementation. Limited administrative options, zero collaborative functions, a clunky "new member request" notification system, a highly limited content management arrangement, minimal control over layout - groups right now work, and there are some examples of really creative implementations, but we need more. We need a way for group admins to publish episodic collaborative content. We need a group branding system whereby content written for a specific group has that group's logo automatically inserted with a custom text blurb, we need the ability to customize our layout to the extent that we could launch our groups as private publications on the internet at large - even possibly map them to our own private domains. There's a lot that has to get done here and I'm eager to see what the team is working on.

Journalism Awards

Journalism? Where? OpinionatedBlogvine is more like it, frequently. I'm not complaining, I use it that way as much as the next guy - but I'm eager to hear what kind of awards they'll be handing out and to see how these awards encourage this "citizen journalism" bit that I've heard so much about. Everyone is all gung-ho about subverting the traditional media but let me speak frankly: most writing here is self-congratulatory, poorly composed and incapable of standing up to legitimate scrutiny. Anything the team wants to do to encourage a slightly more "professional" culture is A-OK in my book.

Vastly extended user profile pages

Ok, I'm cool with this. Newsvine has some minor social networking features, nothing too advanced. I'm curious to see what they are planning to do with it. I don't wanna see this site become facebook, but a bit more information about authors and such could be not only fun but professionally and intellectually useful.

Newsvine Assignment Desk

Other than the fact that it probably needs a new name, the NAD sounds promising. It'd be cool to have a single place with the contacts, resources and legitimacy to suggest/commission stories from willing contributors. Newsvine could probably take someone on staff even to facilitate - someone who is in charge of keeping a database of press contacts, in charge of obtaining press passes and back-door access, responsible for knowing the community and its strengths, etc. If done right, this could be the single most important addition to newsvine since its inception.

As long as this functionality is going to be included, I'd like to see them include a sort of mini-NAD within each group. We could call it a Group-Oriented Newsvine Assignment Desk. It would allow admins to assign stories to members, perhaps with a calendar that we can sync to google cal or ical or iphone or whatever. It would also have a feature whereby completed stories could be submitted to the assignment desk and then automatically published at a certain day or time.

A new take on message boards

What's the old take? Do you mean that newsvine is going to innovate some kind of crazy new revolutionary messageboard system? Because that would be pretty sweet. Eric called for this a while back as a simple solution to the overflow of memes and other meta content.

Basically, it makes sense to me to have a place to put "blog" type stuff, social interaction, memes, metacontent (like this article), etc which isn't featured on Newsvine at large. We're still in this adolescent period where we're trying to figure out to what exactly Newsvine is. I think if they wait another year to put in a message board then it might be too late, but at this juncture I think that such an implementation would go a long way towards refocusing newsvine onto News - which is something many of us would like to see.

Video

I was THIS CLOSE to creating videos to go with my articles, putting them on youtube and linking to them. I guess I will hold off. When video goes live it's going to change this site completely. I can only ask for a simple, accessible integration - no fancy-ass video player popup window, just give us youtube style embeds. And give us the option to publish video as the content of an article, not just as an included moving image.

There are already some wheels turning about what we are going to be doing with this one.

New ways of visualizing news stories within your social chain

Hmm, some conflation of watchlist and friends list? This is worded cautiously and vaguely enough to give me pause - I'd be interested in some sort of visualization feature to track the flow of my social news network. Presumably this would let me track the articles, seeds, clips and/or comments of any or all of my friends in some sort of graphic format, presumably plotted with time down one axis and some kind of weird net geography down the other. Neat.

Writer outreach programs

Offering incentives for writers to publish on newsvine? If you guys implement all of this stuff then your site is going to be its own outreach program, seriously. You're talking about launching a full-scale comprehensive publishing platform - people will be knocking down the door to get in and get popular.

Community Moderators

About damn time is all I'll say. Ok it's not - I think this is a really bold move and I think it's the right one. As newsvine gets more and more members we're going to see an exponential increase in content. The algorithms, while not perfect, do an ok job - but I think it's about time we saw trusted members of the community given special tools to streamline organization. If something is blatantly spam, there's no need to submit a bug report and wait for Calvin - just let viki kill it, yeah? Same for inflammatory content etc. I think that this would certainly need a very public, very clear set of guidelines - but it can only help.

Discussion Clubs

Good. I hope this means special infrastructure - like if I want a book discussion group, I want to be able to create an amazon-referred link to the book, I want special types of posts (Guidelines, Resources, Off the Record, Structured Debate), and I want the ability to package the whole thing up and treat it as a completed artifact once we're done. Build something like this and the uses are going to be infinite - it's basically a one-shot group that's disposable, it'd be a useful tool for everything from reading groups to focus groups to live event coverage. Brilliant.

NCAA

Yeah whatever. My picks never work in spite of my complex "every other one" strategy so I'm not interested. Unless you offer a next-gen 3g iphone as the prize. In which case I'll brush up.

Conclusions

Ok, so that was a long meta rant but it's been a while, right? What thoughts do you all have on these various topics? What do you want to make sure is included, what are you afraid of seeing develop? I'm tired of typing now so I'm not going to bother with any sort of formal - or even aesthetically pleasing - conclusion. Get your closure elsewhere.

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