Newstube

Just found out about a new collaborative service named newstube, which appears to be some kind of digg clone. The idea is to contribute links to news articles related to IT with a short comment. These are first added to a queue, which they exit as soon as there are at least five favourable votes, to be shown on the frontpage.

Sounds like a pretty decent idea in order to avoid junk messages to flood the officially displayed news. But I am wondering who would take the time to actually rate news they read? Usually when I find something interesting, I will take some time to write a post for my weblog, which is first of all like a way to remember interesting things. If other people stumble accross that and benefit from what I write, even better.

The other problem is that just anything which can be referenced via a link and has to do with computers (well, most anything nowadays has to do with computers) could be considered news. Is there anyone who will check if the contributed links are really news or not? Hopefully yes, but until then let's wait and see.

And of course, they're not the first to come up with such a service, not even in the german-speaking market - yigg has been around for somewhat longer. Time will tell whether they're going to make it or not.

My personal opinion is that Google will try to expand their news gathering service with enhanced aggregation and personalization features, either on their own or by continuing to buy innovative service platforms.