Jesus Christ Has Registered For Newsvine

September 27th, 2006

Ok, maybe not that Jesus, but who knows (e-mail exchange on the right).

Some good stuff has been happening around here lately though. Certainly not the second coming, but enough to warrant a post:

We just released August’s earnings and the top Newsvine earner netted $414.27 for the month! Certainly beats AdSense! Hey, maybe letting users earn their own revenue might actually work.
Newsvine made the front page of the Seattle Times today, paper and electronic editions. It’s an article by Kim Peterson about emerging forms of journalism and it’s worth a read.
We also made Scrivs’ list of the Top 10 Web 2.0 Winners, so we’re obviously quite thankful for that praise.
The summer has been great to us, which is rare for news sites. While most news sites experience seasonal downturns when the weather turns nice and people are out of school, we did almost a half million unique users in August and have been up month-over-month for the entire summer.
If anyone’s going to be in Washington D.C. in a couple of weeks, I’ll be speaking on a Washington Post moderated panel with Jeff Jarvis, Mike Arrington, and Herndon Graddick at the Online News Association Conference… apparently the largest journalism conference ever produced. I’m psyched.
Newsvine user Zaki is now reporting from Kabul. Good stuff.
We have some really good stuff to release in the next few weeks. Biggest release since the customizable user columns.

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9 Responses:

Jo-Pete Nelson says:

That’s interesting that news readership declines when school ends. My readership massively declines when school _starts_. I just don’t have time to keep on top of current events when I’m taking classes.

#1 - September 27th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
Corey says:

OMFG111!!! Jesus Christ pwnt Newsvine!

Seriously though, glad to see everything is looking up.

#2 - September 27th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Don says:

Maybe part of this movement Mike?

http://www.jesuseverywhere.com/

#3 - September 27th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
Rob Goodlatte says:

I’ve been a bad newsviner – I haven’t logged in, seeded, posted, or even commented in ages. I’ve just been lurking and reading stories. The guilt is unbearable. Perhaps Newsvine Jesus can help me atone for my Newsvine sins.

#4 - September 27th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
ConÃ¡nn says:

Very cool, but if Jesus has his account cancaled and manages to log back in three days later, I’ll be inpressed.

#5 - September 28th, 2006 at 12:23 am
Jesus says:

This is true, my son. I do not hate Newsvine. So don’t start running Head On commercials or invite Glenn Beck to editorialize for you and you should be in the clear: wwjh.org

#6 - September 28th, 2006 at 6:34 am
Grayson De Ritis says:

Congrats to you personally, Mike; and to everyone involved with Newsvine! It’s great to see the site is doing well. I hope to soon become as active as I was when the site was beta =)

Cheers!

#7 - September 28th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
gb says:

I empathise with Rob… I started out addicted to NV (I was actually reprimanded at my last job for spending too much time on Newsvine), and then (well, with the help of my boss screaming at me) I sort of dropped off. And now it’s huge. And I feel so disoriented. And cold. And alone. I’m hoping that one day, I’ll meet Newsvine Jesus, and I can ask him where he was during this period of Newsvine loneliness? Ask him why, when I look back at the beach, I only see one set of footprints in the sand? And you know what his answer will be?

“Oh… yeesh… yeah. Eek. Sorry about that… I was seeding links. But dude… dude… get this: I totally made like 414 bucks! Goat’s cheese pizza on the NV JC!”

Or something like that. Maybe Utah’s just getting to me…

#8 - September 28th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
Patrick B says:

I was one of many ONA conference attendees that saw your panel. Despite the many groans from the crowd — they’re journalists after all — I think it was one of the better discussions at the conference.

Keep up the excellent work with Newsvine, argueably one of the best examples of news media done right.

#9 - October 8th, 2006 at 4:43 am

Shared

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

- Matt Thompson on why the way we report and consume news is precisely wrong. Matt is, of course, precisely right. If you’re at SXSW next week, I don’t know how you could justify missing this talk.

Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!

Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.

"Add features and customers forever and rake in the dough.":

The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs. I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.

50 Useful Coding Techniques (CSS Layouts, Visual Effects and Forms):

(via doug)

Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. :

I actually really like how clubby it is. Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.

Episode 2 of Dan Benjamin's "The Conversation" is Live:

I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.

LESS - Leaner CSS:

Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.

How 3D works, and why it's back:

Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.

The Importance of Removing Features:

This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)

Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???

A nicely done british parody of 60 Minutes style video journalism. It’s easy to miss how formulaic our news is sometimes. (via B-Tizzle, originally via E-Chizzle)

Colosseo: This is why Cameron is a king and we are all just pawns in his world. I can’t wait to get my hands on this poster. I will point out, however, that the outro credits on the video need some kerning. Someone is going to lose their right hand for that.

Spezify:

New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).

Realism in UI Design:

Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)

Overshared

At the first Doughty show of the night at the Triple Door. If you're in Seattle you should come down for the 2nd at 10. Excellent!