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!

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.

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.

I have now added an RSS feed for the Popular page. Will add feeds to the personalized page once there is any request for it.

For those who have little idea what RSS is, it is basically a useful feature that allows users to subscribe to a constantly updated file that can be placed on websites, browsers or added into bookmarks/favorites. Any updates on Newscri.be can be instantly checked without ever visiting the website itself.

Lastly, any feedback/suggestions to improve upon this service is very much welcomed. Let me know if any of you can find any better news source that we have currently. Anyway, enjoy the app!

Managed to fix some bugs over at the “Remember Me” login (now it actually works!), issues with Google crawler, feeds not parsed correctly, and the “Live Search” results not displaying the correct result.

Also beefed up the signup section to allow potential users to see what they can do with personalized section once they start keeping interesting articles.

Besides, the polling script to fetch new articles has been optimized to give a better update time and it also consumes less CPU resources now.

*Please note that the Physorg.Com, MarketWatch articles have a display problem in Firefox although they work well with Internet Explorer (IE). The articles from BusinessWeek do sometime get messed up with pop up advertisements from the original site in IE however.

I have now released an initial version of Newscri.be for friends and family.

Newscri.be makes finding news that matter easier and more enjoyable. It works very well when there are lots of people keeping track of interesting and hot news. As more of you keep articles that are worth reading, other users can quickly identify good articles that are worth at least a skim through. You can even drop a simple comment to open a discussion about any articles you like. So, by joining in, you are helping the community of readers here!

Hope any of you who drops by here find this service useful in keeping yourself better informed of happenings around the world.

If you like it, don’t forget to bookmark it!