1. I love what Newsvine is doing. I think it makes sense from a business point of view for them and for their users. A blogging platform with social bookmarking AND monetization built in is also really appealing from a user point of view. There's so many ways to contribute with very little learning curve.

Posted at 5:55PM on Sep 11th 2006 by Derek

2. Tsk, tsk Jason, always stirring up rumors for attention and traffic to your site and Netscape. Let's think for a second here. Digg hardly breaks even now and then so why would Digg pay users? This is as credible as me saying the sky will fall because it's raining. Man I would trust an Apple rumor over this.

Posted at 5:57PM on Sep 11th 2006 by Tanner Godarzi

3. Totally - I see no problem with people getting paid for their commentary on Netscape. There's no downside - poor work would be ignored, great work would be pushed to the front page, thereby increasing the revenue for that writer, making it easier for him/her to justify pushing out another piece of great commentary. Go for it!

Posted at 6:02PM on Sep 11th 2006 by Conrad Quilty-Harper

4. I agree with Conrad. I don't see what everyone is so worried about when it comes to paying people for posting articles that are deemed of interest. The good articles will rise to the top and the poster will be rewarded. The bad articles will sink the bottom and the poster will have to try harder next time. And of course getting paid to post comments would be nice if the quality is up to snuff.

I don't, however, agree with the idea of people being able to post their OWN content. That's the domain of web blogs and needs to remain there. Of course there's absolutely nothing stopping these people from having their friends post their blog and etc. The concept has merit but would require a lot of planning prior to implementation.

Posted at 6:10PM on Sep 11th 2006 by Ariston Collander

5. Well, considering that I am currently addicted to newsvine, I may be a bit biased in my love for its format. You get professional news, mixed with links to blogs, mixed with user posts, all in one place. I love being able to not just social bookmark links, but to also write my own views and commentary. Where else can a regular guy write a ten-part NFL preview?

Having said that, it is important to keep the quality of user content somewhat high. If people just write unedited paragraph-long rants, then the feature becomes a negative rather than a positive. Newsvine does have some articles that are below par, but for the most part the user material is rather good.

Newsvine is able to accomplish this basically due to still being a relatively small site. Those that would take the effort to find and use newsvine are the type of persons who would take time and effort in writing good material.

Netscape on the other hand is a very popular site, I doubt you need me to tell you that. The catch is that because Netscape is so popular already if you just unveiled a feature that would allow anyone to write, you may got quite a bit or myspace/live journal quality entries. Netscape would need a way to weed out those paragraph long rants with 15 spelling errors and an inability to grasp the English grammar. Voting is one way for the creme to rise to the top. However, with the current size of Netscape the signal to noise ratio may be far too low to navigate.

Besides at this point, newsvine and Netscape are just different enough in formats that they do not directly compete and can actually quite nicely complement each other. I am still learning the Netscape community, but I can see myself continuing to use both.

Posted at 6:23PM on Sep 11th 2006 by Adam Hobson

6. Let people post their own stories, I say. If the stories are of interest, they'll get votes. If not, they won't.

Posted at 6:26PM on Sep 11th 2006 by Michael Canfield

7. Newsvine users also earn revenue on their bookmarks. I don't think it would be appropriate for Netscape to let users write their own articles, however, largely for the reasons Adam already listed but also because of the many opinion pieces that would get passed off as hard news.

Posted at 8:25PM on Sep 11th 2006 by Corey Spring

8. I think you/your source are onto something here. On Kevin's blog he had a post bashing you/Netscape for the idea of paying top users. And mysteriously last week that blog post was erased...

Posted at 12:07AM on Sep 12th 2006 by Nick Miller

9. i think you're right... Kevin did take his anti-paying post down on his personal blog.

Here is what his post said:


I rarely blog, but I recently saw this post by Jason Calacanis so I thought I'd share my thoughts.

Jason, Clever PR stunt, but man, in the end I believe it's going to do more damage for Netscape than good.... I rarely blog, but I recently saw this post by Jason Calacanis so I thought I'd share my thoughts. Jason, Clever PR stunt, but man, in the end I believe it's going to do more damage for Netscape than good.

Ya see users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations.  All users on these sites are treated equally, there aren't anchors, navigators, explorers, opera-ers, or editors.  Jason, I know AOL has given you access to their war-chest, but honestly, take that money and invest it into site development.  Listen to your existing community.

Think of what your loyal Netscape users must think - you're essentially telling them that they aren't good enough and that you have to buy better users. You can have the best submitters in the world, but if your community doesn't support you it will never work. As for the top users controlling digg, yes, on digg quality content rules.  If users are consistently posting quality stories, they will make the homepage.  Let me give you the real numbers from the database.  As of right now there are 444,809 registered digg users. Since launch there have been 38,848 popular homepage stories, of which 11,943 were from the 'Top 100'.  That means historically less than 1/3 of homepage stories come from the 'Top 100'.

Hope this helps - clone on, Kevin ps - have a beer and relax, it's just diggnation :)

Posted at 12:31AM on Sep 12th 2006 by Jason

10. the orig post was here btw:
http://krose.typepad.com/kevinrose/2006/07/calacanis.html

Posted at 12:33AM on Sep 12th 2006 by Jason

11. Um, I've been posting links to my own content on Netscape. Did I break the rules by doing this?

Posted at 4:10PM on Sep 12th 2006 by Dossy Shiobara

12. Maybe theres a simple half way house to the monetary issue a bit like the old fashion forums such as when you pass a certain threshold on average votes and quantity of posts then you qualify for a monetary incentive. It works with the forums - keeping the link builders / search engine optimzation spammers away so it could work with the likes of digg & the others who my simply post spam to attract revenue.

Posted at 3:32AM on Nov 9th 2006 by Organic Man