What’s Newsvine?

I joined Newsvine several weeks ago, and I had thought to myself, “What is this?” It just looked like a news website that connected people. But it’s a bit more than it appears. Scott McDaniel puts it this way:

Newsvine.com is sort of like AP News + Digg + del.icio.us + blogging + chatting + kitchen sink

When I joined the beta, the most compelling idea is that it seeks to pay its users. My blog is making a few dollars a day, which helps to compensate for my time and energy as well as pay for hosting bills. It doesn’t make enough yet, though. I wonder if a Newsvine user could make any viable income through their system. Here’s what they say.

Writing on Newsvine is a cooperatively rewarding experience. Users share news and information with each other from their columns and Newsvine distributes the resulting ad revenue among users based on traffic to those pages.

It’s about building traffic and rewarding users for that traffic. Much like other cooperative sites that earn most of their value through traffic, like digg or even Slashdot, Newsvine reminds me of Blogger, but without the direct connection to Google and their AdSense revenue stream.