NowPublic.com - the Wikipedia of News
I’m sure the majority of you know - and have used at least once in the past - Wikipedia, or any of its wikibranches (wiktionary, wikibooks, wikiquote, wikinews, to name just a few).
The idea behind Wikipedia is, somehow, the old and neglected “give the power to the masses” idea. People from all over the world have the chance to write, edit or contribute with custom content in thousands and thousands of encyclopedia posts, covering a range from typical flora & fauna articles to the latest Marilyn Manson album. It combines, in a way, Encarta and UrbanDictionary and … Google? Maybe, if you use it for data mining.
But how about creating a news site that contains articles from all over the world, written by, say, you? You always wanted to be a reporter, no? NowPublic.com gives you the golden opportunity.
Think News Wikipedia++ : write articles, whatever strikes you as fancy, about your city news, your country news, your world news. Write your own context or transfer context from other sites. Upload your pictures. Share. Give the opportunity to others to view and contribute in your article, offering both critique, context and pictures. Blog. Find localized articles. Get the chance to even sell your high-resolution image of that elephant stomping on the police car.
Sounds interesting? Apply in NowPublic.com and check it out. It has great potential.
December 30th, 2005 at 12:59 pm
You say:
“The idea behind Wikipedia is, somehow, the old and neglected “give the power to the masses” idea”. Here is my comment to this:
Wikipedia is considered to be a classic Web 2.0 tool because it is a peer production, because it has an open code and because it is open for every user to edit. It shatters the unique honored status of the encyclopedian and gives each one of us the opportunity to say: hey! I wrote an entry!
But there is one crucial aspect in which Wikipedia is old fashioned Web 1.0 and that’s the macro-content structure of the articles. Each article has a beginning and an end, premises and conclusions, an old-encyclopedia style flow. Mini-QTpedia (http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2005/12/mini-qtpedia.html)
is going to change all that. It will take relevant excerpts from few articles and put them on the same page. In case a keyword is shared by many articles it will bring all the contexts in which it appears. The user will have no clue how the design of these excerpts looked on Wikipedia, were there pictures? Were there headings? Were there suggestions for further research? even the name of the Wikipedian will disappear and in order to find out all these elements the user will have to use the link that heralds each QTpedia excerpt.
October 26th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
[…] Then it’s the functionalities : name one news application functionality that Newsvine does not support. Tags, blogs, real-time news contribution, everything. I already liked NowPublic.com (which recently had a redesign – still using tables, though) but Newsvine is another league all on its own. […]