Newsvine

I just got invited to try the private beta of Newsvine, and so far I like it. I think of it as digg and del.icio.us meets blogger. There's a lot to it, but it consists of a few different parts: news from traditional sources like the AP, CNN, etc, viewer submitted stories (called seeds), and user contributed stories (called a colums, but really are blogs). They use tags to organize things, and have direct links to the main tags.

It is similar to digg because popular seeds get put on the homepage.

Each user has their own watchlist as well, so you can add your favorite tags right to your personalized home page. You can also comment on articles and see what other people have to say about them.

OK, so this is nothing new. Newsvine is, however, the first service in my opinion to tie everything together well in an appealing way. Up until now, I have been using digg as my news site, Netvibes as my home page, and Blogger to blog (although hopefully I can switch to f2o soon). With Newsvine, I can hit all of these on the same page.

If anyone wants an invite, send me an email at jgrace103@gmail.com. I've got 20 of them right now.