Newscribe Blog

I like the question being posed in this very recent article in BlogCritics. Certainly a very good question. One of the good points raised there are that the crowd is smart only when they are allowed to make independent decisions without being affected largely by the decision of others.
“There are problems with the current wave of user-driven sites, like Reddit, Digg, and Netscape”.

In my opinion, the next generation of social news sites should really harness the collective wisdom of the crowd by minimising the social networking aspects and instead concentrate on the relevance of news content. Newscribe certainly attempts to address this issue by providing only premium content which ensures the quality range of articles remain high at all times, but still remain entirely user driven. There is very little room to game the system, like what we can see with the current popular social news site.

I believe that instead of a user-generated & user-driven site, a pure user-driven site will be able to provide more relevant content in the long term. Mob rule is not entirely a dangerous thing if the contents are of good quality.

Very interesting question. According to an article in Blog Herald, medium like the newspaper, radio and TV in the past did not firstly have a business model at all (all content are freely distributed), then transitioning to advertising as a source of income, but finally arriving at subscription as the preferred business model.

Would blogs follow the same suit? It seems that they should - but I can’t see how. Influential blogs may do that, but at the expense reader backlash. Smaller blogs are certainly out of question as they cannot even rely on advertising to generate sufficient incentive to keep blogging.

I think that blogs rely too much on the content provided by the mainstream media that in the end, subscription based model just would not work. Articles provided by the majority of blogs are not compelling enough to attract many readers.

A centralized platform that aggregates many users’ opinions may well be a good place to make a subscription model work. Citizen journalists should not be hindered by the barrier of participation (taking care of the nitty-gritty of setting up a decent blog) to get incentivised for their opinions.

It is worth noting that there are too many blogs nowadays - creating an even lower signal-to-noise ratio of breaking news than ever before. I tend to agree with the title of this article, although I disagree with some of the points presented.

Indeed, blogs provide values in news that the mainstream media do not cover, but more often, what I am seeing is that news on blogs are already covered in the mainstream media, just that they are not put on the spotlight. I do hope Newscribe addresses this issue by providing a platform where breaking news stories are more discoverable than ever before.

Currently receiving tons of traffic from a Mashable article featuring Newscribe.

For those of you who are into video, Screeniac has done a very good demonstration on what Newscribe has to offer and what our tool will allow you to do. A big thank you to the Screeniac folks for doing such a wonderful job!

Just got a note from Saurier over at MoMB (Museum of Modern Betas) that Newscribe is being featured there. Thanks a lot!

Hope to get more feedback from MoMB visitors on how I can improve this service further in the near future. We are ready to listen.

I am glad that most of you have enjoyed our service. May the community of citizen journalists here continue to grow. We are still small, but growing fast.

For those who don’t know, we actually pay out a small sum of monetary incentive for our valued reviewers on site. Contact us here (don’t forget to include your email address) or by email for further details.

I have just released an upgraded version of the site. Like the new look of it?

We hope that it becomes your one-stop solution for reading news obtained from trusted sources.

There is also now a recommendation system that gathers news based on individual user’s news consumption habit!

We believe that a community of citizen journalists can be built by providing a platform that allows for easy mediation of quality news analysis. In this version, a system to rate reviewers has been built into the application to allow users to judge the quality of reviews.

Therefore, we are trying to bring here a community of aspiring journalists who are eager to contribute reviews and opinions on current news content gathered on the site. We seek volunteers to write frequent news reviews on our site and will explore further opportunities in terms of offering monetary incentives for active reviewers. We encourage any potential news reviewers to invite friends to join the platform and vote favorably for their quality reviews.

We are seeking volunteers to write news reviews on our site on a frequent basis. As an incentive, we would like to explore further opportunities with quality reviewers. Please encourage friends to join in and vote highly for your reviews!

It’s been some time since the last update.

The good news is I have decided to take this news service as my final year degree project on “Web Technologies”. This should be really exciting as I get to combine what I am passionately building with university work.

Now, I have a few feature extension that I will be releasing that will surely make this application more robust than ever. Some of the features I am working on are an improvement over the commenting system, real-time article updates and fresh articles highlighting. The latter 2 features should allow news to be displayed in a very convenient manner as soon as they are captured into our system.

There is one more important feature that I will be working on to make this service an ultimate tool for everyone who reads online news. It will no doubt be a one-stop solution for users who prefers reading a variety of mainstream news over other less trusted sources of news from the web.

Here is a recent article which I think has some grounds in whatever I doing to this news service. Just that the “modern editors” mentioned there are the users of this service themselves.

I have rolled out 2 feature improvements to make Newscri.be even better!

The Live search results for every topic in the Popular section can now be viewed in pages!Secondly, when visit the Latest page, it will remember your last visited section so that it becomes your default page. You don’t have to go click on your last visited section link anymore!

Also, in case it is not obvious, clicking on the headline topics in “Popular” will bring you to relevant “Latest” sections.

So, this is how Newscri.be looks like as a hierarchical graph. I thought it is amazing how it appears. The colours denote the various forms of HTML codes used in the website.

You can see other examples of such graphs of other websites here.Back to some more updates, this time round I have modified the appearance of several parts of the website, namely the footer of every page (hopefully more eye-pleasing) and the Signup/Features page, login page and more attractive looking “Keep” button. Any submission of comments on articles also refreshes the page properly now for a better site navigation.*Also found out and added a good news source - the PEOPLE Magazine to the Entertainment section. Enjoy!