So Newsvine has opened its doors to the rest of the world, after being in private beta for a while.

Mike Arrington loves it, and calls it perfect. He says he likes it because it combines the best features of a number of other services, like Digg and Google News.

So let’s take a look and see what we think.

A Good Opening

But first, I have two good things to say about Newsvine. One, it is a very pretty web site. Web design is too often overlooked in the Web 2.0 space, but that’s a mistake. The colors and design create a peaceful vibe that will draw people back to the site all by themselves. Second, the developers resisted the urge to throw up a site with a neat logo and call it a public beta. The site is new (at least to those of us who weren’t beta testers), but it looks full and rich with content.

Easy Sign-Up

Signing up was easy. The confirming email arrived right away and I was up and running in no time. I got in ahead of all the other geeks named Newsome and got newsome.newsvine as my personal Newsvine page.

So What’s Next

There are several news topics you can choose from to get content. Of course I went straight to Tech. The NTP enrichment action was front and center, as expected. There were other stories about the likely cast of subtopics.

The first thing I noticed is that all of the linked stories are hosted on the Newsvine site, either in their entirely or on a jump page that leads back to the entire article.

You can write and publish posts to Newsvine directly from your personal Newsvine page, or you can “seed” an external story which will be linked from a jump page. Then others can “seed” the story if they want- sort of like Digg. News by content sure is the rage these days, but I have to tell you, that vague uncomfortable feeling I got when I looked at Digg has grown into a raging sideache where content by contest is concerned.

Again, you can “seed” external links (much like Digg), and there is a button you can add to your browser to help you do so, along with a brief description and tags. It is considered bad mojo to seed your own posts, so you have to rely on others to do that for you.

The whole content by contest thing seems really stressful to me, on both ends. Writing a story and hoping a bunch of other people who are almost certainly writing their own stories will vote you up the chain to a place of exposure seems too hard and potentially frustrating. And quite frankly, I don’t like the idea of getting news in its order of popularity.

I expect either you get what I’m saying or you don’t. But I really don’t enjoy that concept.

The other thing I wonder about is how many people want to post content at Newsvine, as opposed to on their own blogs (recall that you aren’t supposed to seed your own stuff, so the only way to get content on Newsvine without help is to write from your personal Newsvine page). The Help page says it’s OK to cross-post content at Newsvine and your blog, as long as you don’t seed your own stories.

Writing over there seems dilutive to me. Granted, there is a revenue share on ad revenue, but I’m still not sold on writing my heart out on my Newsvine page.

About that Page

My Newsvine content creation page looks pretty well designed and full featured. I decided to repost a short post I did today linking to Mark Evans, just to see how it works and in general it worked very well. There ought to be a WYSIWYG editor with an easy way to add links, but I know html, so this was not that big of an omission. It may be more of a problem for the less tech savvy.

I posted that article. And it immediately showed up on my Newsvine page. There are links on the post page for chatting (how many people could there be reading a post at the same moment, but OK), Commenting and reporting a post (presumably for bad language, etc.).

So publishing content is pretty easy and seems to work well.

Early Conclusions

I need to explore more, but so far it looks promising. I’m not sure I would post a bunch of new stories on Newsvine as opposed to my blog, but I might cross-post some stuff if I started getting any meaningful flow at Newsvine. I might also “seed” a few external stories, but the whole news by contest thing is really a buzzkill for me. I must be in the minority as far as that goes, however, since Digg and other similar sites are so hugely popular.

A good opening, with potential

Alex Halperin has a great read today about some of the social networking sites that are at the core of Web 2.0 and beneath the bubble that threatens to grow amid the frenzy that erupts every time someone uses the words “social” and “networking” in the same sentence.

A lot of these social networking and other Web 2.0 sites are well designed and interesting. One or two of them will get enough mindshare to survive and make some money. But somehow, just making some money isn’t good enough any more. We have to huff and puff these applications into some sort of a world-changing, IPO-in-the-making, eBay slaying juggernaut.

Let’s set forth a universally recognized truth from one of the great artistic creations of our time and see how we can apply it to the current situation.

First, a Reading

King Arthur: I am your king.

Woman: Well I didn’t vote for you.

King Arthur: You don’t vote for kings.

Woman: Well how’d you become king then?

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king.

Dennis: Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Farcical Ceremony

Again, a lot of these Web 2.0 applications are cool. I use some of them.

But let’s do a reality check. Web 2.0 and its creations are the playground of a very small subset of the population. Most people don’t know what Web 2.0 is, much less what tagging is. Say “social networking” to 98% of the people you know and they’ll think you’re talking about online personals.

Add the fact that the low barrier to entry for some of these applications results in a crowded space.

Then add the fact that very, very few of these applications have any hope of revenue other than via the crowded and cyclical online advertising game.

And you end up with something like this:

small user pool + lots of competition + no non-ad revenue = ?

And then try to tell me how there is enough money to be made to warrant all the buzz some of these applications are getting?

It’s like a bunch of kids making play dough creations. Every few minutes someone jumps up and says “look what I made!” Everybody oohs and ahs and then resumes working on their own project. The only difference is that at the end of the day, the play dough goes back in the can. Some people have convinced themselves that the Web 2.0 play dough will go in the bank.

The Moral of this Story

The problem is the scale, or at least the desired scale. Not every great idea or technological advance lends itself to the sort of scale and revenue it takes to become a juggernaut.

If I were the developer of one of these applications, I would try to think more like the family owned corner market and be really good at it. Pretending to be the next IBM is not only a waste of time, but it keeps the focus macro when it ought to be micro.

To my knowledge, the following sentence is the longest one I have ever written.

Trying to work his way back onto my reading list after being one-half of the most arrogant conversation ever held, Nick Carr takes a look at the ludicrous amount of over the top buzz surrounding Edgeio and basically puts one right between the eyes of the lesser fools who are trying to huff and puff up a new bubble in the hopes that some greater fools will toss cash instead of blue ribbons at the latest round of science projects that some are trying to spin into businesses.

That’s 88 words of bad writing, but it says exactly what I want to say.

Other good reads (pro and con):

Techdirt
Jeremy Zawodny
Mike Rundle
Jeff Jarvis

Cory Doctorow posts today about Podzinger, the podcast aggregation service that also converts podcasts to text and allows users to search the entire text of a podcast. The technology allows you to find certain keywords and click on them to go directly to the relevant portion of the podcast.

I have talked about Podzinger before, and I list all of my RanchoCast podcasts there. Here is the RanchoCast podzinger page.

I really like Podzinger for a couple of reasons.

First, I like the design and layout of the page. You can skim down the page, read summaries of the episodes and immediately download or stream any podcast that grabs your attention.

Second, of course, is the searchable index of the converted podcasts. I wasn’t sure how well the service would handle my podcasts, since much of the content is songs with talking only at the beginning, in between and end. Surprisingly, it does a pretty good job.

It doesn’t get all of the words correct (I suspect my southern accent may have something to do with that), but it gets enough of them right to be useful. For example, I did a search for “Ray Wylie Hubbard” and it located that text in my introduction of one of Ray’s songs that I played in the last episode.

Again, it’s not perfect, but Podzinger does what other podcast aggregators do, plus the searchable text thing.

It’s a win win deal for podcast producers and listeners alike.

If you have a Technorati account and would like an easy way to add Newsome.Org to your favorites:

Add Newsome.Org to Your Technorati Favorites!

Many thanks

Richard MacManus posts today about the various personal portals that have recently come online and the effect of the same of the traditional portals like My Yahoo.

I have been thinking and writing about the both the new and old portals as well.

The New Spin

Along with social bookmarking and the 50,000 or so online calendars, one of the new Web 2.0 lines is the reinvented personal portal. Many of these applications are Ajax-based, which makes them easier to customize, on both the developer and user ends. Richard says, and I heartily agree, that:

[T]hey all use Ajax in the UI. For that reason there’s something uniquely “Web 2.0” about personalized start pages. But in other ways, they harken back to the dot com era when portals were all the rage (Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, etc). For example, the main aim of the game is still getting traffic.

Like a lot of Web 2.0 stuff, these portals are improvements on existing things, not the revolutionary new creations that some people like to believe (or more accurately, like to try to make us believe).

The New Players

That’s not to say these new players in the personal portal game aren’t worthy. In fact many of them are. I have already written about some of them already:

Pageflakes and Eskobo
Favoor

and several others are future contestants in my Web 2.0 Wars series.

Others that Richard mentions are Netvibes and Protopage. He also posted an Ajax homepages market review at ZDNet and mentioned LinkedFeed, ItsAStart, Zoozio and Wrickr.

Are Portals Still Relevant?

I absolutely believe they are. I have defended them here and here.

In a nutshell, I believe portals are still highly useful as newspaper alternative, to aggregate the sort of content that I find doesn’t really fit into typical RSS readers. Rather, these pages take content, often from RSS feeds, and display it in an organized, newspaper-like manner. This allows me to skim newspaper-type content in an online, but newspaper-like, manner.

I read blogs via a feed reader, but I still get my news, weather, sports, stock prices and similar content via a portal.

What About the Old School Portals?

While not as Ajaxy as some of the new players, I still find My Yahoo to be, by far, the best of the personal portals. Recent back-end changes have made it very easy to add RSS content to your My Yahoo page.

Richard makes a good point when he wonders when Yahoo will enable Yahoo Widgets content in My Yahoo. I agree that this is a good idea and I expect it will happen before too long.

Google and Microsoft are also involved in the portal game, via Google Homepages and Windows Live. While those applications are closer in look and feel to the new Ajax-based applications and backed by companies with huge mindshare and pocketbooks, I don’t like them nearly as much as My Yahoo, Ajax or not.

Conclusions

I view blogs, Ajax and all the other Web 2.0 stuff as complimentary to a good, old fashioned personal portal. And while Yahoo needs to be aware of the new players in the game and work to keep up feature wise, I still think My Yahoo is the best personal portal solution available today.

Some of these new players may pass Yahoo in the personal portal game, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

My money’s still on Yahoo to win.

I am profoundly underwhelmed by all the buzz Ask is getting lately.

So they canned Jeeves. Good, that whole shtick was silly from the get go.

Gary Price, Ask’s Director of Online Information Resources (which may one day join Plaxo Privacy Officer in the job name hall of fame), has a good summary of why Ask thinks it can become relevant. Gary admits that Ask is a work in progress, but sets forth some things that he believes will give Ask an advantage in the search engine sweepstakes.

Granted, some of that stuff, like the answer engine concept, is interesting. But Henry Blodget nailed it again today when he set forth his version of one of my core themes:

My theory about the search business, moreover, is not that “users will immediately switch to the best search engine,” but that users will use whatever search engine they are used to using–unless the gulf between that search service and the leading search service becomes so great that it cannot possibly be ignored.

Chris Sherman has nice things to say about the new look, feel and performance, but the fact remains that Ask has a small market share in a pretty mature space.

I’ll give Ask a try, but from where I sit, I don’t see the revolutionary advance it would take to get significant user migration.

Now that my link count problem has been at least temporarily fixed, I can resume my role as a self-appointed customer evangelist for Technorati.

Dave Sifry just announced some cool new features.

Technorati Favorites: You can add you favorite blogs (up to 50) to a personalized Technorati page. For some reason some of the feeds in my opml file wouldn’t import, but that may be a problem on my end, since I had to use Bloglines’ brain damaged export function.

Here’s my current Favorites page (the first 40 blogs in my opml file, plus 10 that didn’t quite make it). It’s a cool idea, but I wish you could have more than 50 feeds.

You can also search your favorite blogs via the Favorites page. Technorati has created widgets and buttons you can put on your blog to allow someone to easily add your blog to their Favorites.

OPML Exports: There are now little buttons at the bottom of each Blog Finder search that allow you to export those blogs into an opml file.

Lots of huffing and puffing beneath the bubble as Om reports on a rumor (and he calls it such at this point), that Six Apart, the company that brought us TypePad, Moveable Type and Live Journal, has raised another $12M in financing.

The fact that the word another and million are both in that sentence is scary enough. The fact that there’s a 12 before the word million means it’s time to run to the store for water bottles, batteries and plywood. The bubble may be upon us.

Go read Om’s post for the details on what he has heard and to see any updates once he tracks down some of the players.

Om ends by wondering about the exit strategy for Six Apart. You can be sure if some supposedly smart money is investing serious money in this company they have one. And I can only think of two:

(1) get bought by one greater fool, such as Yahoo or Google or another company that has lots of money burning a hole in its pocket; or

(2) get bought by a bunch of greater fools in an IPO.

Generally speaking, there has to be an exit strategy because, sadly, few of these new tech companies really plan on selling a product for the long term- most of them are interested only in selling themselves.

I suspect there is a hush all over the VC world (to paraphrase Herman) because the first one of these one-trick ponies to actually admit it wants to go public will face token scrutiny by some old media and outcry by those stalwart few who remain committed to learning from the past.

But when one of these companies breaks from the pack and heads towards Wall Street, the rest of them will stop and watch closely. If the first one makes it without falling flat on its face, I fear the race will be on.