Is This Another Social News Web 2.0 Gimmick Website?

What you see above is not a screenshot of a Beta version of Digg or Newsvine. And believe it or not, it’s not a crappy knock-off script either. It’s actually a site called Newstin, and now, as usual, I’d like to make fun of the website talk about how useful it is and how we can make money with it.

OK, I can’t resist… What’s with the design? Is a mix of light, medium, and dark gray supposed to be appealing? Or am I colorblind after being subjected to so many grotesque internet marketing sales letters?

What is this thing?

Newstin seems to be yet another type of news site. The thing is, it could be pretty advanced. The home page offers customization of the top stories, quick translations into various languages, and some Java Applet for formatting a navigation web/map/tree thing.

Could I get any of it to work? Nope. At least not to my liking. And if I wasn’t a sleazy internet marketer looking to exploit sites for personal profit, I’d leave now. (Since I can get the latest news I want and set things up perfectly on my iGoogle homepage without any learning curve.)

Back to basics.

Let’s take a break from making money and just get the latest news on the Presidential race… I click on Elections and get a list of news stories ranging from “Presidential race moves to Ohio, Texas” to “Thousands protest over Armenia election result.” You see the problem?

See, Newstin is based in the Czech Republic. They probably care about international headlines. But I’m an ignorant American who has never heard of the town “Ohio, Texas,” let alone Armenia. I want to read about how Bush is very successfully implementing foreign policies so I can feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

On to the money.

There are three ways to make money here.

1) Find all the breaking news stories. For this I suggest the Advertising and PR and Marketing categories. Watch these categories for good stories and then announce the news on your blog and hopefully capture some of the people looking for the original story.

It’s pretty easy since there are RSS feeds for each topic, and feeds include aggregated stories from Google News, Yahoo News, and others. The drawback is the fact that some stories come from places like EzineArticles, meaning there are useless spam stories in there too.

[It's funny if you think about it - you're trying to repost news from other sites (i.e. spamming) and you're finding a bunch of self-promotion articles (i.e. other people's spam.)]

2) The Ever Popular Autoblog. Instead of monitoring the RSS stories, just use them to popular your autoblog with a wider variety of ripped-off content and watch your black hat SEO fantasies come true.

3) Spam the community. Now I don’t see member profiles yet, but a site like this with any sort of Web 2.0 functions is bound to start a community of users sooner or later. (Note to anyone from Newstin that might see this – build in some anti-spam features!)

Anything else?

I think so. White I haven’t found the site to be a shining example of usability for the general public, there is something there. Whatever they’re doing to categorize news by topic and manipulate the data could be extremely useful for a big business looking to stay on top of the industry, for a well-funded startup analyzing trends, or perhaps for a PR firm.

It’s worth checking back later to see if they have started Web 3.0. (Or at least Web 2.1)

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