Digital Journal offers a Citizen Journalism site in a similar fashion to Instablogs, OhMyNews, Newsvine, Norg Media and others. Members contribute news items for the site, and in theory the wisdom of the crowd combines to create a Google friendly news resource. Where Digital Journal perhaps is a little different in this space is that it revenue shares with contributors, and has paid out $38,000 to CitJ’s already (note I said in this space, the model has been used by blog networks for years, and the line between this and blogging is pretty thin).

The new features include collaboration tools that is claimed to set the site apart from the competition: “Blogging, paid news reporting, a massive photo department, social networking tools like Groups, and much more.”

DigitalJournal comScore numbers aren’t encouraging (50,000 page views in March), but I don’t hate it, it’s just that its yet another CitJ site. Instablogs took $3 million in March so there’s interest (and money) in this space still, so DigitalJournal may be well positioned going forward; besides: getting paid anything in the land of expecting your users to build your Web 2.0 fortune for free is always a positive.

The India based Instablogs launched in October 2005 originally as a blog network. The site has changed over time to become predominantly a citizen journalism site that competes with services such as Newsvine, complete with mainstream media syndication deals.

We’ve seen a number of documents related to Instablog’s quest for funding, but as no deal has been finalized we won’t publish them in full, however some interesting stats and quotes as follows:

• Instablogs is doing 2.5+ million page views per month with 12,000 registered members
• $300,000 in revenue last year
• The company is profitable and is pitching its location as a competitve advantage cost wise

From the SWOT analysis Instablog lists its Weaknesses as a high attrition rate of writers, low CPM rates and 30% unsold inventory.

Projections:

Instablogs says that it wants to use the funding to:

Expand the business model, hire key management, technology development which includes but not limited to buying more servers and additional bandwidth, partnership and alliances with more News Agencies, to invest and retain core writers, and online and offline advertising. 


I can remember covering Instablogs the day it launched and it was a rocky start. The site had 46 mostly empty blogs and didn’t initially gain a lot of positive coverage. Today lack of content is a problem they don’t have, with a fairly well-rounded portal covering a wide variety of topic areas. The numbers are fairly impressive, and should they take funding it would further legitimize the blogging/ CitJ space as a business proposition.

The deal, which closed on October 5, was all cash, but the acquisition price is not being disclosed. Both companies are based in Seattle. Mike Davidson, the founder of Newsvine, said that the companies will continue operating separately but that technology integration will occur over time. MSNBC has around 200 employees; Newsvine has just six.

Newsvine reaches this liquidity event after having raised just $1.5 million in capital. It joins both Stumbleupon and Mozy , each of which were also acquired earlier this year after having raised less than $2 million in venture capital.

This brings the total number of meaningful acquisitions of social news sites to three: Fox bought Newroo in March 2006 for $7 million (it is currently MySpace News) and Condé Nast, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit in October 2006.

Newsvine was recently mentioned on the Daily Show when Davidson “enhanced” Senator John McCain’s Myspace page.

NewsVine sees ElectionVine as their answer to mainstream media’s traditional polling methods, turning the tradition polling model on its head by delivering a distributed polling system that can be used by blog/site owners across the United States. Anyone can hold their own election on their own site and even go as far as endorsing a candidate. The site-specific results show what percentage of each sites readers are Democrats, Republicans, or backers of a certain candidate.

The strength of the application comes with an aggregate view of how the election is shaping up in the eyes of the distributed blogosphere. With several months to go before the primaries, NewsVine expects to have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of these independent polling places throughout the web.

What better way to test the system then to embed it in this post. Let us know (anonymously) which candidate you’re supporting by participating in the first ever TechCrunch Presidential Poll; polling widget to the right.

Overall ElectionVine is a clever implementation of widgets that is bound to find an appreciative audience amongst American bloggers.

For related news, see our coverage of MySpace’s plans to hold their own presidential primary in early 2008.

Among the changes: like Netvibes, Pageflakes and other personalized homepages, users will now be able to move most modules on the Newsvine home page around, or delete them altogether. Users can also add whatever news feeds they want to the home page by adding a RSS feed module.

Until now, web services that allow customization generally put the feature in a standalone area. Yahoo has my.yahoo, for example, but doesn’t allow users to make changes to the main Yahoo home page. Like their often-copied feature of allowing user comments to news items, this may be another way that Newsvine reshapes the online news industry. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the New York Times, USA Today and other sites allow users to create their own version of the newspaper, possibly even allowing outside RSS feeds in, in the next year or so. This builds intense user loyalty and makes it much more likely they’ll spend even more time on the site.

Other features include the addition of local headlines and weather and a slideshow called “News In Pictures” that shows a continuous stream of AP pictures.

Newsvine also just got bigger, stretching from 900 to 1240 pixels. The extra width can be collapsed with a click.

Newsvine has raised just $1.25 million in a single round of financing in July 2005 from Second Avenue Partners. They have six employees. The site currently brings in 600,000 monthly unique visitors generating 3.5 million monthly page views.

Screenshots and video are below.

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/syndicated_player/index.jhtml

The first time around this could be laughed off as a simple mistake, although it highlighted McCain’s flip-flopping positions on gay marriage. But now some people are going to question whether the guy can hire competent people to surround him. The original story will hit mainstream press this morning. Lots of people will be going to McCain’s MySpace page. And they’ll see a sloppy site. More on Newsvine.

Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement:

Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females.

The story is also up at Newsvine here. This reminds me of a similar situation when Microsoft used an image hosted on Flickr on one of its blogs without the permission of the owner, Niall Kennedy. Niall replaced the picture with a pornographic image, which was then published on the blog. His idea was to send a message to Microsoft on the importance of respecting licensing of IP, although some people thought it was childish.

McCain’s MySpace page is significantly higher profile than the Microsoft blog, and Davidson isn’t posting pornography to the site. He’s making a political statement while also sending a message about respecting the property rights of others. I expect the changes to be reversed quickly, unless the wrong person is sick or out to lunch today. Either way, we’ve captured it above.

Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance: the raw number of clones and Digg gaming schemes out there. We’ve seen rigging, vote buying, profile sales, and accusations of thug rule. The dozens of clones include a not-bad SourceForge project called Pligg, which lets users “build their own Digg”.

But Digg’s ubiquity and influence doesn’t mean it’s perfect. A number of startups are tackling the same problem as Digg – sharing of good content via link submission and some form of voting. One of them, stumbleupon, actually has more registered users than Digg. For the most part, though, these sites won’t be able to do much damage to Digg’s steady growth. But many of them are worth looking at, and they all have individual features that could, if incorporated into Digg, make it a better overall service.

*Personalized refers to recommendations uniquely tailored for each user

BlinkList
BlinkList takes a distributed approach to the Digg model. It lets anyone get their own link blog where they can add their favorites. BlinkList then looks across the whole network and ranks the site based on how many other users added the link.

ClipMarks
Instead of full URLs, Clipmarks lets users share just the best parts of webpages. Using their plugin, you can bundle together your favorite selections of content from a webpage. This includes text as well as pictures and video. Submissions are then “popped” by other members of the community, with the most popular at the top. Using the plugin, you can also submit your clips to your blog. Currently, the site’s two pane page layout gives me the feeling of looking at the net through a steamship porthole.

CoRank
CoRank confronts the mob mentality on Digg. Digg promotes stories to the front page based on the votes of the whole community, resulting in a lot of noise for users with interests different from the crowd. CoRank lets you look at all submitted links or filter out the noise by subscribing links from just the users you choose. Only the highest rated stories from your subscribed sources make your front page.

Netscape
Netscape has also taken on Digg’s mob mentality, mixing in their own team of anchors to submit stories and cut out spam. The anchor’s stories are featured on the front page along with the current top 25 stories. They also got into a little hot water with their recruitment practices. Netscape has managed a greater variety of content in it’s front page, pulling 2 stories from each of the top 10 most popular channels and 1 story from each of the next 5 most popular channels.

Newsvine
Instead of a submission free-for-all, Newsvine implemented it’s own form of quality control by only allowing users to vote on content from the Associated Press and other user’s personal articles. Users are given a live feed of all the latest AP stories, voting on articles and writing their own on their personal column page. Newsvine shares 90% of all revenue generated by advertisements on your column page with the user. Users can also personalize their feed

OpenServing
OpenServing is a product of Wikia, and the opensource version of BlinkList works for fun or profit. The concept is the same, a personal page of links, democratically ranked by your friends, but it also lets you post your own ads on the site.

Reddit
Reddit made headlines when Conde Nast acquired them. The site is a favorite of mine and is still up and running, with some key differences from Digg. Reddit rankings are based on an absolute vote (+1 for hot, -1 for cold), meaning a story can dance up and down Reddit’s top page instead of being buried out of existence by a few power users. To see what’s on top now, there’s also a “hot” list. This type of voting system also means the front page can be stagnant, to the chagrin of some users, but it has also avoided Digg’s payola scandals. Another bigger differentiator for Reddit is their recommended article page, which suggests links based on your voting pattern.

Spotback
Spotback is an automated alternative to Digg, that aims to use personalization to improve the signal to noise ratio of the stories you see. You train Spotback by clicking and voting on the stories it digs up. Voting positively on a story causes Spotback to reveal the next most relevant story. One of the best parts about Spotback is that it doesn’t even require a registration to get up and running.

Spotplex
Spotplex is another automated link site that automatically submits stories from blogs carrying its badge. Stories are then ranked on the Spotplex homepage based in part on how many views the article generates (the algorithm is still being tweaked). The site’s automation and closely controlled blogroll seems has avoided the types of rigging Digg was subjected to, but it lacks the community of commentors that make these social media sites addictive.

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon provides a different user experience while discovering and digging up links. You use a tooblar (FF & IE) to tag, submit, and vote for links. While the site does rank links the main experience is by taking a random walk around the internet. It keys in on Diggs greatest strength, an easily accessible constant stream of interesting links. StumbleUpon is definitely catching on, they recently surpassed 2 million users.

Newsvine combines the best features of a number of companies and products like Digg and Google News with great features like chat and blogging-style comments. The result is a perfect news site (note that new competitors, like spotback (mentioned here) are aiming to overthrow Newsvine already, however).

The result is a really wonderful social news experience. They are also planning on a revenue sharing arrangement with news contributors (we’ll see how that goes).

Congratulations to Mike Davidson and the team at Newsvine. It’s now a site that I visit at least daily.

FYI, Newsvine was mentioned quite a bit in today’s Gillmor Gang.

Newsvine will be a collaborative, social news site. Like other sites, Newsvine will show major news publications. However, readers can comment on news items, allowing for a discussion to ensue.

They are also adding tagging. Any user can bookmark a news piece (or any web page) with a tag such as “sports” or “Iraq” and it will become available at Newsvine under the URL newsvine.com/[TAG]. If you are interested in seeing news on a given tag, you can of course go straight to that URL as well.

Newsvine will use a voting system, like Digg, to determine how relevant a given news item is. I think these user-determined ranking systems, like Digg and Memeorandum, are a great way to push good content to the top. I’m looking forward to seeing this live. (Via Steven Cohen and Om Malik).