Digg and MSNBC's Newsvine

Digg
Digg is an independent citizen news outlet that combines everything from social bookmarking, to syndication such as RSS or Atom. Digg provides space for people to submit information about everything and anything found on the internet. Once an entry has been submitted, users can vote on the content, to ultimately bring the most popular topics into the limelight. The most “Digged” material receives the most publicity. Since there are no editors in this open source project, everyone views the raw content exactly as the author desires. Digg is one of the top 25 sites in the United States.

How Digg got started
Digg was founded by Kevin Rose and was started as an experiment in November 2004 by a group of people who are currently involved in the management of the website. It was introduced to the world about a month later, on December 5, 2004. The group is led by Jay Adelson who is the founder of the company Equinix. All user submitted by Digg members themselves. Digg members must vote, or "Digg", an article enough in order for it to make the front page of the website. The first release of Digg didn't contain advertisements, however as it got more popular, they revised the site to include advertisements as well. The access to the website is free; however, one has to register to submit an article, to comment on an article or to promote stories. Currently, advertisement submissions for the site are handled with the help of Microsoft.

How it works
Registration for Digg is also free; anyone can submit what the Terms and Conditions of the website offer as; "including, but not limited to text, user comments, messages, information, data, graphics, news articles, photographs, images, illustrations, software, audio clips and video clips, also known as the 'Content.'" When a Digg member enters his or her link into the database, the members casts “Digg” votes for their personal favorites. If an entry then accumulates enough votes, it is posted on the front page which attracts millions of internet users. Since most people like to talk about the top choices, Digg offers its users a series of tools that enable them to discuss various things informally through comment boards at the bottom of a link's description page. Digg also allows its members to view who "dugg" the story, and makes it easy to see if any of your friends on Digg "dugg" the article as well.

Navigating Digg
The front page of Digg displays five main categories to explore: All, news, video, images, and podcasts. Each of these tabs listed at the top of the website, has eight subgroups that provide a narrower scope of media that pertains more to your interests. These subgroups include: Technology, world and business, science, gaming, lifestyle, entertainment, sports, and offbeat. While surfing these topics makes it easy to discover news, videos, etc that pique your interest, users can also navigate through two other groups that display the most “popular” (this is the default for the front page) or “upcoming” pages. These categories are a valuable tool if you want to randomly rummage through Digg and end up somewhere completely unexpected!

Digg Labs
Digg Labs provides a much broader and deeper view of Digg. Every day, a lot of information is submitted to Digg, so many things may be missed. Labs projects look beneath the surface of the Digg community's activities. These projects are the results of collaboration with Digg partner Stamen Design. The front page shows five sections to search through: Pics, Arc, BigSpy, Stack, and Swarm.

Digg and the Open ID Movement
In February of 2007, Kevin Rose announced in London that Digg will adopt the OpenID decentralized digital identity platform. Open_ID is a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet. Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have also joined this movement. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members: Scott Kveton (MyStrands), David Recordon (Six Apart), Dick Hardt (Sxip), Martin Atkins, Artur Bergman (Wikia), Johannes Ernst (NetMesh), Drummond Reed (Parity and OASIS XRI and XDI TCs). They all had the goal of helping to promote, protect, and enable the OpenID technologies and community.

Newsvine
MSNBC is a top news site that belongs to NBC. On October 5, 2007, MSNBC Interactive News purchased a community based news website titled Newsvine.

History
Newsvine, a collaborative news website that allows the public to efficiently interact with the news, was created March 2006 in Seattle Washington, which the company continues to use as its hub. The overall goal of Newsvine was to "bring together big and little media in a way which respects established journalism and empowers the individual at the same time." (Newsvine website) Since the various persons involved with this project had previous experience with the likes of large media corporations including Disney *Disney and *ESPN, it comes as no surprise that this website lives up to their expectations.

What Is Newsvine
With content submitted and updated in real time by citizens around the globe, Newsvine is a representation of what the world is talking about at any given moment in time.

How it works
The joy of Newsvine is that users can read both material from well known news sources, such as the Associated Press, or they can delve into news articles provided by other users. Articles do not come with a concrete inherent value due to the poster. Instead, articles are judged on a variety of criteria that include "freshness", "popularity", and "reputation". The judging is not limited to the editors. Anyone in the Newsvine community can submit his or her two cents about the posted materials.

How Users Can Cash In
According to Newsvine, users are provided with 90% of the revenues acquired from the traffic their respective pages receive. The other portion of earnings is given to the user whom referred the traffic to the page. If no one referred the user to the Newsvine page, the proceeds are used to help cover the maintenance costs of the page.