NowPublic-Crowd Powered Media

Posted by Vivek ||

August 6, 2008 ||

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With the outgrowing number of Web 2.0 services launched each day, I am not sure how many of us after signing up with them keep a track on regular basis. User generated content is one of the most powerful philosophies of Web 2.0 era. From videos (youtube), to photos (flickr) to news (digg), the new mantra for success today is create a platform for users to upload/generate content.

With the plethora of such services we usually miss out on some great ones which could make it big on the web 2.0 arena. One such service is called as NowPublic. NowPublic boasts itself of being a place for media powered by the crowd. IMHO, I always have beleived that the media should be powered by the crowd. However, the philosphy of NowPublic is very much similar to Digg. What separate it however from digg is that it’s focus on news stories. Digg has become a platform to popularize blog articles written by users and manipulated to be top story on digg. NowPublic is more closely attached to Journalism and has a very strong focus only on news articles and media related stuff.

Let me take an example to prove this point. Let’s say I want to read the tech related stuff on NowPublic. I go to Tech & Biz section and what I see is only news related to tech and business. Articles like these:

Instructor teaches students how to code viruses
Asian Cloning Industry Gears Up
Inflation will stay high despite a global recession
iPhone comes to Estonia

I don’t see articles (which are more popular on digg) like

Top 5 iphone applications
5 Known Office Suites for Linux
The 12 Worst Fitness Inventions Ever

I hope I was able to distinguish the two services. I am not trying to suggest anything about which is a better service (If I were to say that, I still spend a lot of time on Digg and love it to core).

Let’s now see what makes “Wisdom of Crowd” when it comes to media a better platform. First thing I do when I get up in the morning is to check BBC site for my news diet but off late I love going on NowPublic for the very basic fact that I get a more diversified dose of news compared to BBC. Not that BBC reports are of low quality, it’s just that they can only do so much with a dedicated staff and freelancers. Also, some part of BBC is now attracting user reported/generated news and Indian media is not untouched from the same phenomenon. I see a lot of news channels encouraginb users to send news videos. Freelance Journalism is expanding it’s reach.