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"NowPublic is a welcome addition to the growing list of (repackaged?) News 2.0 companies.  It's essentially the Newsvine model - ie. a hybrid of Digg-like linksharing (for external news sources) and on-site article creation.  However, Newsvine's disruptive innovation was to reprint Associated Press feeds and open them up to public discussion - something that traditional media companies don't dare to try.  This doesn't seem to be a part of NowPublic, and I wonder if that's a weakness or just a different approach.  \nYou can also submit photos and video clips to NowPublic.  And for the extra bonus point: revenue sharing!  How will this work?  Well, NowPublic hopes to license the video contributions to news outlets (this sounds like a hit-and-miss tactic strategically speaking, but we'll see).  \nIt's way too early to call this one, but Newsvine has made such a convincing play in this space that NowPublic et al have their work cut out.  Nonetheless, there are some fairly nice touches to the NowPublic site - when you visit an external site, for instance, you can still read the comments in a frame at the bottom of the page.  They also provide links to launch AIM or Yahoo Messenger straight from the site, which is an interesting way to foster interaction.  (Counterpoint: the benefit of blog comments is that the discussion is out in the open - how does launching an external IM client fit in to this picture?  To put it another way: if new media is about changing the one-to-many system of old media into a many-to-many relationship, shouldn't the discussion also be many-to-many, rather than one-to-one?)  \nBut let's not fret about the details - the important thing is that the NowPublicans (?) have impeccable taste: the screenshot on this page shows my name on one of the browser tabs.  How can I fault that? :)\nPS. Mike Davidson of Newsvine was interviewed this week on the Inside the Net podcast.  Interesting discussion on how Newsvine was largely embraced by the blogosphere, while others weren't so lucky."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/01/27/nowpublic-share-the-news/>