Newsvine…

Received an invite to the private beta of a new RSS-based service called Newsvine (though I’m in the second wave of people). I like the service!

You know what though? It’s kind of a mashup of concepts around aggregation, blogging and social promotion of articles.

Surprisingly, the service seems to have hit a unique sweet spot that combines the best of Digg (reader picks and promotion of articles based on, shall we say, popularity of reads); a news aggregator like Newsgator; and a *very* easy way to “Seed Newsvine” with anything a person reads while surfing the ‘net through a Seed Newsvine link in my Bookmarks Toolbar.

They have a *very* interesting twist: they’ve added a participatory piece to Newsvine. You can set yourself up as a “columnist” and post, seed articles, place links, and more. I can see very quickly three things:

1) There will be too many columnists
2) There will be too many articles
3) People will vote for articles en masse getting to what I’ve said previously in posts: too much content, too little time, and I don’t necessarily care what everyone else cares about.

Still, I really love how attractive it is and that it is laid out so cleanly. This makes it inviting to use and I think you’re going to hear a lot about Newsvine soon.