Newsvine: Whose Vine Is It, Anyway?

Note: My crusading days are well past me now, so this is mostly for my own entertainment, though there is an infinitesimal embedded hope that someone, somewhere in this sprawling User Generated Content circus, will eventually pause to think some of these things through and improve the current, mostly cobbled-together early model for aggregating, exchanging, and circulating information value. Cheers!

On Aug 15, 2008, at 2:00 PM, Newsvine Help wrote:

Hello,

Please note that Newsvine is a platform designed to enable collaborative discovery and discussion of the news -- it is not a vehicle for self-promotion. As such, it is the community's policy to prohibit the seeding of links to your own web site, and/or the posting of material deemed to be advertising or of a promotional nature. You are welcome to list a web address under the 'personal home page' field on your account settings page. A link to your home page will then be available to other users on all of your articles and seeded links.

This policy -- and all other guidelines from the Newsvine Code of Honor and User Agreement -- is designed to help keep Newsvine an honorable place. We fully understand if this particular guideline wasn't immediately clear.

Best regards,

- Newsvine Team
Additional information can be found here:
http://www.newsvine.com/_cms/info/codeofhonor
http://www.newsvine.com/_cms/info/useragreement

My Response

Oh, the policy is quite clear, I just believe that it is wrong for a number of reasons.

Foremost, *I* am your CONTENT and I own ME and all that *I* produce. My work is a gift from me to you if I choose to use your pretty templates to do what I already do in a hundred other places.

If anyone is curious to know why the policy is wrong, one could start by watching this http://blip.tv/play/Ab69Ra47 and reading this.

If none are so curious, that's okay too, we'll just use some other service for publication of our particular newsvines. There is absolutely nothing special that forces me or anyone else to use this particular "vine."

Not attempting to be unproductively combative ... just passin' on another view of truthiness for those who care to consider it.

What many social media sites are not quite realizing is that they are equally fortunate to have all of us as we are to have the pretty templates that sites like Newsvine provide. That is pretty much the only thing of value NV provides: a pretty template with predictable subject hierarchy, and a statistically unknown (though possibly some day significant) global brand. Even then, the brand is only as valuable as US, THE PEOPLE, unless you want to just be a Green Themed version of Google News.

I appreciate that it burned a ton of VC cash to get to where you are, but we the people don't really care about those debts and we are of equal and even greater value than pretty templates and fledgling brands. So feel free to banish my account if you like, it is no skin off my nose in the least. It is, however, ONE LESS CONTENT PROVIDER and one less ad viewer and distributor for Newsvine, right?

Again, please pardon the abruptness, but it is to establish a point that seems to not be getting through to people who really do need to find ways to adapt the model, or ships will indeed sink. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right?

I am more than happy to intelligently discuss all of this with anyone who cares to help prevent Newsvine's otherwise inevitable bankruptcy; but if there are no such people at NV, I only wish you ...

All the best,

m.s.