Newsvine - The Least User Friendly Site I Have Ever Used

Have you ever used Myspace? ;)

I certainly won't pretend that there's no learning curve -- but I think you're making it harder than it needs to be.

You have a column.

http://kaykay.newsvine.com

All of your articles and seeds reside their after they've been posted.

Your daughter has a column as well. I'm guessing your daughter is either lauhal or indecent. (A guess based on looking at your friend list.) I'm guessing your daughter is not Dennis P. McCann.

http://indecent.newsvine.com
http://LAUHAL63.newsvine.com

Their articles and seeds also aggregate to their column. Your column (and their column) has an archive which you can see by clicking "see more" at the end of the list of articles on your column.

At any rate -- Newsvine definitely isn't the least user friendly site on the internet, and I'd be shocked to find out that you've never encountered somewhere less user friendly -- but even so:

There are a lot of people who really like helping new (or old) users find their way.

Still, it's much easier to do so if you ask specific questions or have specific topics you'd like to learn about.

Yeah, what Brian said. And there's a Newsvine Help Group here with loads of helpful articles, tips, and tutorials. Feel free to check that out.

There's also a bi-monthly Open Help Thread posted in that group where you can ask any question you might have -- just look for the little red heart with the angel wings and halo that I always use on those Open Help Threads. The most recent one is here, and that article includes a nice list of some of the best from the Help Group.

Hey, kaykay. I'm sorry you've been having so many problems figuring out how to use the Vine. I was a little stymied at first myself, but I finally figured it all out, due to the help of fellow Viners, and taking time to just play with how everything works--moving everything around on my column, seeding lots of stuff, etc.

I'd be happy to help in any way I can, but Newsvine Help is always a great resource. This recent Help article has a huge list of links to helpful articles.

Now, if you wouldn't mind coming over here and standing next to this pole? Err... who's got the matches?

;)

Sometimes I can vote a 4 and sometimes I can only vote a 1. Is there a method to the madness?

You can actually only vote a 1, if it says anything higher than zero that is how many times other people have voted on it. i.e. an article that has 4 votes has been voted for 4 times, and if you vote for it the number will change to 5 and so on.

This comment will have 1 vote on it, as I will vote for it myself, I am also giving your article 1 vote.

I think Behind My Screen hits on a crucial point.

Newsvine is not intended to be yet another news forum.

It's set up to be a online news publication. Community-based, yes, but a news publication. Thus, it's arrayed like a newspaper is, with similar/popular articles being clustered in modules on a grid.

However, and I think this trips people up a bit, you can't think of it just as a news publication, either. On the surface, it is designed like one, but just under the surface, it has a wide array of navigational tools focused on navigating the community itself.

The left column of each page is devoted to community-centric links, and the search box up top searches by article text, but more importantly, by user and content tag. I've always found it easy to immediately find any author's articles using the "Users" search.

(While I agree that online text should rarely be yellow or white, the "personal menu" text is light grey, which cuts down on the bloom effect.)

Can someone explain why we vote on comments? Higher votes on comments means? Maybe I need more coffee this morning.

I'm not sure if voting generates extra revenue for the commenter or comment voting pushes the article up the vine, but it builds users' reputations and often serve as a simple measure of perceived community value.

Comments with at least 5 votes get a green star in their headers, indicating that the comment is most likely judged to have some merit by the community. The star serves to highlight said comments, and is an incentive system for creating appealing (e.g. funny, incisive, thoughtful) comments.

I think the lack of a Vote Down option is crucial to cutting down on a lot of community friction. Unlike communities like Digg, or even the recent comment voting systems implemented in Gawker blogs, passive-aggressive vote-up-vote-down wars are discouraged, having replaced the Vote Down by the Report Comment button, which stops a lot of negative rating due to simple partisan bickering in its tracks.

As for payment, Newsvine employs a profit-sharing system with its users. Newsvine generates revenue using ad placement, which it then shares with its users. Revenue is definitely tied to popularity of articles you write, but I suspect it's also tied to the popularity of comments you write as well, which adds another dimension to comment voting.

On seeding, do you tag and categorize your seeds with relevant information? I don't mean to be condescending if you already do, but just to make sure you maximize your exposure:

If I'm seeding something like "Eating Bat Guano Prevents Cancer, Scientists Say", then I'd select the "News Event" option, and categorize it under Science (Health also works).

For the article summary, there are many different styles. I usually find the best summary passages among the first four or five paragraphs of an article, and paste them verbatim, into my article summary. Some people write up their own summaries, and still others offer personal commentary in their article summaries.

Then, I'd fill in relevant tags in the tag entry bar below the sumamry entry box: bats, science, medicine, health, nutrition, cancer, disease, guano, weird, odd-news, ace-ventura

Of course, the very last tag isn't intended to be used for serious tag searching, but in reading articles/seeds, a number of users read the tags, and I sometimes give these users one or two attempts at humor.

Finally, I'd try to find the geographic origin of the content, such as the location of the university where the research was conducted. Newsvine has a live search which gives you suggestions based on what you've typed so far. I've found that it's usually spot-on.

The sheer number of options and sub-communities offered by Newsvine can be intimidating, but don't be afraid to simply bang around the site. I doubt you can break anything, and just running around helped me a lot in getting acquainted with some of its more advanced features.

kaykay:

It's a feature, not a bug.

kaykay -

Here's an idea - when you're trying to get Newsvine to make sense and/or work for you, forget that you're sitting at a modern computer. Pretend you're working in Windows 98 (1st edition), and see if you can access the odd mix of patience and stubborness it used to take to make it work.

I find Newsvine quite easy and intuitive to use. I have noticed a little bit of delay between my posting and when it appears on my column but that's about it.

It seems to me that there could be some bug with your account (if your page is blank sometimes). Maybe you could contact the site administrators and ask them to take a look (there is button that says "Report bug" on the top right corner of main page). Anyway, just my thought.

I suspect there's a positive correlation between the quality of a website and how much you have to pay to use it.

Yahoo is one example: anyone can use the basic services for no cost. This is acceptable as long as you set your expectations low. A while back they changed the email interface and in doing so removed a feature I used often. Figuring it might actually still be there but under a different menu I wrote to their customer service, only to receive a reply that indicated that they didn't even understand my question. On another occasion they made some changes to the TV program listing page that, again, gratuitously removed a feature that I was fond of. This time I didn't even bother to contact them.

Here on the Vine what irks me the most is how slow their servers are in delivering up pages, and that often the page never comes up at all (an error message shows up instead after a long wait). This is particularly annoying when you're trying to post a long reply ... I'm now in the habit of copying my text and pasting it into another window (like WordPad) so if the Vine hiccups while posting, the text doesn't get lost in the ether. I've hit some quirks like those you've seen too.

Isn't technology great?

I use Firefox 2.0.0.6. The slowness happens with Internet Explorer as well.