/Interview/ Mike Davidson and his Newsvine.com
17/08/2006 | Filed under Discover > Interview
.net catches up with Mike Davidson. Of the raft of new sites launched this year, Newsvine has attracted praise from tech fans all over the web. .net grilled its creator Mike Davidson on the story of the site and state of the web in general
.net: For the uninitiated, what is Newsvine and what distinguishes it from a myriad of other web applications?
MD Newsvine is a place to read, write, and influence the news. We syndicate thousands of the same stories you read on sites such as CNN.com, as well as accepting individual contributions from people all around the world, but we do it all without editors. The audience is the editor, selecting which stories receive prime placement and which authors get high marks. It’s an editorial meritocracy designed to get everyone involved in the creation, consumption and discussion of important issues.
In response to how it’s different from other web applications, I’d say that Newsvine isn’t designed to completely change the way you do things. It looks a lot like your favourite news site ... just a little smarter, a little faster, and a little more of what you’d hopefully like in your news reading experience. Newsvine isn’t dependent on Ajax, RSS, or any of the other technologies that companies love to talk about these days. We make smart use of these and other technologies, but to us they’re just tools. If Ajax itself is the most compelling thing about your website, you should probably rethink what you’re trying to create.
.net: How will it change online news?
MD The draw of big media had always been that you were getting your news from a relatively small, yet proven, group of experts. But with the advent of the Blogosphere, and personal publishing in general, people began to realise that there are lots of great stories out there and most, up until this point, have gone untold. At Newsvine, our concept isn’t to create a divide between big and small media, but to let both live alongside one another in a symbiotic relationship whereby each makes the other better. One of our goals is to turn news into conversation, and by blending the roles of established media and personal publishing in a compelling way, we feel we’re helping to achieve this.
.net: What kind of technologies did you use to build Newsvine?
MD Newsvine is built upon a mix of open source technologies, commercial platforms and proprietary components we’ve built from the ground up. Many companies commit themselves to using only one of the preceding elements, but to us, it’s always been a question of using the right tool for the right job. It’s best to start by looking at which open source alternatives are available to you, and use them when you can. They’re free, generally well-written, and can give you a head start in development. However, you may notice holes in what an open source stack provides. At that point, you examine commercial alternatives and DIY options and pick whichever gives you the best benefits at the lowest cost. We ended up going down the commercial route with only one piece of our architecture, but that decision has already paid for itself.
.net: How do you plan to make money from Newsvine?
MD Newsvine, like almost all news media sites, employs advertising as its primary source of revenue. Subscription content on the web has showed a steady decline over the last few years, and we expect this trend to continue. Where Newsvine is different, however, is that our cost to serve content is a mere fraction of what other news sites spend. The cost structure is so low that we can even afford to share revenue with our users, which we do. Most of any revenue generated from articles you write on Newsvine goes back to you. Our philosophy is that where you add value to Newsvine, you should receive value in return.
.net: Whose work on the web do you most admire?
MD I’d say my top three muses are Shaun Inman, Khoi Vinh and Todd Dominey. Although I’m a designer, I’m not much of an art historian, or even an art lover in general. I respect art for what it is, but it’s design that really inspires me. Design not only elicits emotion but provokes reaction. On the company front, I think The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Digg are doing some really interesting things. It’s cool to see big media thinking smaller and small media thinking bigger.
.net: Are we in another dotcom bubble? What’s the big difference between startups in the mid to late 1990s and today’s start-ups?
MD I certainly think there’s a bit of a mini-bubble going on right now, but the way I detect bubbles is by looking at how many questionable products and services are getting funded and to what degree. It’s perfectly fine to fund an unproven company – I mean Newsvine itself is in that category – but when you start to see all sorts of wacky ideas get $5million, $10million or $20million in financing, you have to wonder if things aren’t a bit too frothy right now. On the bright side, the difference between this mini-bubble and the gigantic bubble of the 90s is that it generally doesn’t take $100million to find out if your idea is going to work now.
.net: What kind of challenges do the web designers of today face?
MD In many ways, they’re the same challenges of old: giving up control. Moving from the print design world to the web design world in the 90s was about relinquishing control of your typography, your layout, your image quality, and all of the other details you were used to controlling on printed pages. In this decade, we’re now giving up control of the content itself. People want to view your content in a web page, on a mobile phone, and so on.
.net: What plans do you have for the future, Mike?
MD Well, I haven’t taken a vacation in a while, so I’d like to do some scuba diving, but for now it’s all about Newsvine. We’ve only been live for a couple of months and I feel like we’re just scratching the surface, so only time will tell what’s in store. As long as we continue pushing boundaries, I’m happy.
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