Newsvine Participatory News Site Featuring Videos in 2008
The latest Newsvine newsletter contains some upcoming features and improvements for 2008. Needless to say, Videos are coming! (There will be other goodies coming too like Journalism Awards. “New ways of visualizing news stories within your social chain” sounds also very exciting).
I wonder which video platform/ player/ service Newsvine community-driven news site is going to use. As a wholly-owned subsidiary of MSNBC Interactive News (msnbc.com - Microsoft terrain) since October 5, 2007, it is still not featured amongst the NBC News Who We Are sites, although Newsvine is its first acquisition (yes, the Microsoft empire is clenching its fists to push into social media). Nevertheless, Newsvine wishes to keep its integrity and autonomy and continue to be a counterbalance to the mainstream media offering a certain flavour in news delivery. Will this autonomy be reflected in the choice of video distribution?
If we have a look at the Video section of msnbc.com, it would be very logical to assume that Newsvine will make use of MSNBC video service (still in beta) recently introduced on the Alpha Channel blog of MSNBC by Stokes Young (Dec 12 2007). But it is not a UGC video platform, not even embeddable yet.
Anyway, one of the oldest members of the Newsvine community, Mikola Mykola Bilokonsky asks for the following:
When video goes live it’s going to change this site completely. I can only ask for a simple, accessible integration - no fancy-ass video player popup window, just give us youtube style embeds. And give us the option to publish video as the content of an article, not just as an included moving image.
I think it sounds very telling that we not only ‘google words’ any more (which Google feels as a depreciation of its brand), but we also have “youtube style embeds.” Both services setting very very strong industry standards for competitors. On the other hand, some Newsvine members like Guy Montag fear that Newsvine could turn into ‘a YouTube’.
I am absolutely sure that Calvin Tang (COO), Mike Davidson (CEO), Lance Anderson (producer), Mark Budos (CTO), Tom Laramee (senior systems engineer), Josh Joskey (Director of Technology) etc. and the good Newsvine community will not let it happen, but I am very curious about the video outcome.