Why Newsvine is Better Than Digg
Dec 9 at 2:02pm by Andrew Benton
It’s no surprise that I found myself wanting to write an article about this, I am a member of both Digg and Newsvine, contribute to each, and like them both equally for their individual strengths. Both of them run on the basis of user-generated content; digg through article/picture/video submissions, and Newsvine as a place for new-age journalist to write to a niche of other writers and daily news and opinion readers. While each of them are pretty different, both in audience, age range, maturity and content strength, to me at least, Newsvine is the more superior of the two.
I want to first say that by superiority I do not mean sheer numbers, if that was the case then Digg most assuredly wins. What I’m talking about is relevant, educational information that me as both a contributor and a writer, can read and ascertain to make myself a more educated individual. Below are a few areas that Newsvine is great in. I will talk later about what Newsvine could do to improve their readership though.
Usable Knowledge
If you look at the front pages of Digg and Newsvine respectively, as of the time I’m writing this article, this is what I see:
Digg Top 5 Stories:
Newsvine’s 5 Most Active Stories:
As you can see from the comparison of the two, Digg pretty much only has one, maybe two real articles that could make you any smarter. With Newsvine, all 5 are interesting, researched, well-written articles by the community, for the pure reason of educating fellow Viners.
Maturity of Community
With the comment system in place with Digg, the vast majority of it’s users do not welcome any comments that contradict a particular story. For example, if a user were to post a breaking story related to Bush, they almost always mis-title it inaccurately to get a view across, for a perfect example, see here. An article that is clearly from a site with slanted views, titled in such a way to not even be news, but rather a partisan attack with a misleading title.
On to Newsvine. While I do believe some of the same “tin-foilers” from digg (from all sides of the aisles) show up on Newsvine, the system is much better at handling these kind of people. For one, you can flag a comment so that if it is truly of no value, inflammatory, etc, it can be removed. The main difference that I’ve noticed however is that the community of Newsvine likes to use the comments section as more of an open forum, rather than a pedestal to either condemn or promote the story. Most Digg articles seem to be quick rips at whatever party, then one side subsequently votes the view down. That brings me to another thing that I really dislike with Digg. If you post something contrary to a articles overview, you almost assuredly get voted down so no one will ever see your comment unless they go looking for it. For example if someone posted a positive article about Ron Paul, and someone brought up a point about Ron Paul that was not positive, the “fan boys” of Ron Paul would most assuredly bury that comment. It’s almost a communistic information controlling by the masses. Newsvine does not allow this to happen, it actually has the community behind it that loves to debate, argue, disagree and discuss. I have never seen people on Newsvine flag someones comments unjustifiably, but it happens 24/7 on Digg. The bottom line with maturity is that Newsvine has lots, Digg has hardly any.
The only noticeable difference I’ve seen about Digg in relationship to Newsvine, is that if you’re looking to drive traffic to a site, or become popular, Digg is the way to go, if you are just worried about content, Newsvine is the way to go.
So, what do you guys think? Am I way off?
5 Wordpress Plugins You Can’t Live Without
Nov 16 at 10:10am by Andrew Benton
Wordpress is an extremely powerful CMS. It lets practically anyone with access to an internet connection post their thoughts, dreams, and ideas. Wordpress has revolutionized and pushed the blogosphere to new depths and continues to push the envelope on seamlessness with external social networks.
While out-of-the-box (while it doesn’t really come in a box) Wordpress is great by itself, you can make both the writers, as well as the readers experience infinitely better by installing just a few plugins. Below is a list of what I think are the cream of the crop in Wordpress plugins. Feel free to hop on the conversation and add your input, suggestions, etc.
- Akismet - View Plugin Website
This is by far an absolute essential, so much so that it comes pre-installed in Wordpress now. Akismet helps filter out spam from your comments, and helps your site appear more constantly clean, with great comments being the only ones allowed. - Adsense Manager - View Plugin Website - View Authors Website
This one is another essential for me. Adsense manager allows you to manage adsense campaigns on your blog by allowing you to save custom configurations of Google ads to use on your page. Basically, once installed, you create ads, in which you can change size, colors, types, etc. Once you create them, you easily insert them into your templates and posts by selecting them in the post editor or by including a short piece of code into you template where you want your ad to be displayed. - All in One SEO Pack - View Plugin Website
This plugin provides automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your Wordpress blog. It basically saves you hours of work optimizing your website for search engines. A fear key features:- Rewrites title for optimization
- Generates meta keywords from your categories, built in tag-generators, etc
- Auto-generates meta descriptions for each post, making posts more directly findable by search engine searches
- Google XML Sitemaps - View Plugin Website
This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. Absolutely positively a necessity if you are serious about getting listed on Google and Yahoo searches. - Social Bookmarking Reloaded - View Plugin Website
Social Bookmarking Reloaded adds a list of graphical icons at the bottom of every post that lets your readers submit your articles to popular social sites like Digg, Reddit, Facebook, etc. It can really help build the community of your site. You can customize the appearance of this plugin and select from a huge list of social bookmarking sites.
So, there you have it, my essential 5 Wordpress plugins that I can’t live without. I’m sure there are a few more I’ll add to that list in the near future. Do you think I’m missing any? Let me know.
This is Just Funny… If You’re a Nerd.
Nov 8 at 7:07am by Andrew Benton
This website has tons of funny comics like this one: http://xkcd.com/
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