Written by: James Burke
Wednesday, December 27, 2006

A Community of Practice (CoP) essentially connects people to knowledge, knowledge to knowledge, knowledge to people and people to people. The ability to attach “people” to content is central to realising a CoP.

Newsvine, and Digg, both rely on content to be put forward and promoted by the sites users who find that content of interest and value. Digg has built up quite a momentum over the last year with many mainstream sites now providing a “digg” icon to encourage the promotion of content. Newsvine has approached the content and user acquisition challenge in slight a different way by using Associated Press (who supplies all news stories to Yahoo, MSN, CNN etc.) as seed content whilst also allowing “freelance” newsvine journalists to prepare and submit their stories on par with the Associated Press content.

All stories are open to the public for review, voting and discussions and “no” editorial control is in place to artificially rank the importance of the stories.

Anybody can also “seed” Newsvine by using a browser extension to bookmark and forward stories, this also acts as a useful personal journal whilst browsing that can be reviewed and discussed at a later date – this has great potential for educational purposes.

The personal profiles is where the CoP like functionality starts to come to play and starts to provide some contextual depth that other “social networking” sites lack.

•    www.newsvine.com
•    www.digg.com

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