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Over the past few years, the Web has seen considerable changes down to its very core. With the spread of web standards awareness have come many new technologies and innovations, an immense amount of new techniques for designing and coding websites, and brand-new community-based websites that are currently turning the Web upside down as we speak. The web is growing, it always has been and it always will, but now a new site is bringing order where there was chaos, combining the best elements of the best new websites of late. Now, there is Newsvine!

If you look at two things that have dominated the face of the Web very much over the past few years, you'll see RSS and Atom syndication and - buzzword-alert - folksonomies, which indicate a new model of community-sites, in brief.

However, there is one that's even much, much bigger: blogging. The advent of blogging has seriously changed the face of the web, and it's not stopping or even remotely showing signs of slowing down. The size of the blogosphere doubles every five months, and as of October 2005 a new weblog is created roughly every second!

Nowadays, even your uncle's dog has a blog of its own (well…) and the signal-to-noise ratio is becoming terrible. The amount of content that is truly worthwhile is increasingly difficult to find, and sites like Del.icio.us and Digg.com try to bring some order and structure in the ocean of information, but it's not enough. For one, both of them are largely "techie-sites", meaning their primary user group consists of people with a preoccupation for tech-related subjects. Next to them there is, of course, Google, but even combining Google with a good Feed reader won't really get you where you want to be. People who actively subscribe to feeds will probably recognize this problem: you just don't have time to read everything anymore.

The Web of today is much more the organic entity that it was envisioned to be, than it has ever been before. With pingbacks, trackbacks, feeds, content syndication, blogging and so much more, one can no longer think of the Web as purely a collection of technical aspects. It is no longer computers and wires and a bunch of signals being sent across the planet in a fraction of a second; the Web of today is a living, breathing organism and it's growing into every and any direction imaginable.

But lo and behold, a new site emerges to bring order where there is chaos, to bring balance and overview where there is anarchy. Newsvine is the new company and site by Mike Davidson and co., and combines the best elements of newssites, social bookmarking sites and blogging.

Newsvine's strength comes from the combination of features it offers. I quote from their Welcome page:

If you're just into reading, you'll find thousands of Associated Press articles posted and indexed faster than any site on the web. If you'd like to discuss the news, you'll find places to chat and comment within every article. If you'd like to write your own column - and collect ad revenue from it - Newsvine will publish it for you. And finally, if you'd like to create your own public trail of interesting stories you've read around the web, seeding Newsvine is for you.

Once you sign up, you can create your own subdomain, which then becomes your own little corner on the site. It is the home of all articles you write and seed, complete with a little bio page so people can learn more about you.

But you don't have to use it in order for Newsvine to be useful for you. What makes Newsvine so interesting is seeing the community fill it up with high-quality content, seeded or written. Where your feed reader is convoluted with stories that may not really interest you, Newsvine offers the community's finest choices to you via their simple but powerful tagging system. In and of its own not a new thing on the web, but combined with the ability to write your own articles (blogging, basically) and seeing your content listed next to AP content makes it a lot more interesting.

Overall, the look and feel of Newsvine, combined with its quickly-growing community, really stimulates you to write your best articles and seed your most interesting links. Sure, you're technically free to write about your dog's adventures in the park today, but the nature of Newsvine will ensure that only the truly interesting things will be presented to you first. I've already found this to be the case for news related to Apple somehow - and have proceeded to completely ditch all 12 newsfeeds on the topic from my NetNewsWire. A big unsubscribe-moment later and I no longer have the clutter and endless duplicates of topics when browsing tech news.

When push comes to shove, Newsvine seems more than capable of doing what it's set out to do: bring order in all flavors of news and present high-quality content to you in the most efficient way possible. It is an organic web and an organic Newsvine, but the latter has a much higher signal ratio and - right now, anyway - little to no noise at all. It should be very interesting to see where things go with Newsvine indeed.

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