The Seattle P-I — operating one floor above Newsvine Global Headquarters — just evacuated because of an Anthrax threat. Helicopters, cops, fire, and medics are all circling the building right now. All Viners safe and accounted for.

NEWS & INFORMATION Newsvine.com
Today's Top Stories See what everybody is talking about right now, and add your two cents. That's the basic idea behind Newsvine.com, a Web 2.0 cocktail that mixes elements of Digg (social news), Netvibes (customization) and NowPublic (user-generated news). The most prominently placed articles are the ones voted most important by users. You can plant your own "seeds" on the vine, i.e. links to stories from elsewhere on the Web, along with your comments, to start a discussion. You can also change the page layout by adding RSS feeds and moving the boxes around. Most articles come from familiar sources (Associated Press, The New York Times, BBC) but Newsvine also invites members to write their own columns and create their own Newsvine groups to discuss areas of common interest. Recently the site added local news and weather, and a "News in Pictures" slideshow from the AP.

This is great news. We're looking into supporting OpenID here at Newsvine as well and have wanted to for quite some time.

Who knew our very own Corey Spring was a right winger?

Chris "Long Tail" Anderson looks at Guy Kawasaki's first year of blogging and how AdSense has failed miserably to monetize it. In short, Guy's blog is about the 40th most popular blog IN THE WORLD and AdSense brought him only $280 per month.

It's important to keep these sorts of things in mind when thinking about your motivation for writing a column or a blog.

There is value in the mob, but the mob needs to have principles. They need to be disciplined before they can really lead to intelligent choices.

Alex Bosworth covers the risks and rewards of letting users do "too much" with your software or in your digital community.

There appears to be a bit of a flap over at Kevin Burton's place in regards to a guy going around sending DMCA notices for content he doesn't own. This opens up all sorts of questions about DMCA notices, perjury, and what people who don't want to get involved (e.g. Six Apart, Newsvine) should do.

Nick Denton's take on why Jason Calacanis left Netscape.

First one to solve this issue gets a gold star.

John Grohol discussed the finer aspects of growing and maintaining good communities online.

A great article about the U.S.'s major competing news sites. Turns out CNN.com staffs about 250 people while MSNBC.com staffs 175. As for Newsvine, we're content with 5 for now. :)