Why seed articles already on Newsvine?

Duplicates, existing in multiple ways, are indeed a problem, and from what I've heard the Newsvine team is working on ways to solve it.

I agree with your opinion. The most valuable articles I've seen thus far on here are those that people have written in opinion of other news articles or just flat out opinions they have. Newsvine doesn't lend itself to being a user's blog per se, but it is effective as a personal column. Gee, that's even what it's called. The articles themselves are sometimes good enough that I'd like to link Newsvine from my blog, but then there would only be a few people that could follow my links so I suppose I should hold off on that for now.

I think that if multiple versions of wire articles keep getting posted, Newsvine will begin to get the same issue that Digg has. DUPE! And a thousand users per article can chime in to tell you about it.

Yes, I have discovered that as well. What I do is before I seed an article, I just do a quick tag and full text search for any key words, and if it comes up as already in the system, I just click the little up arrow, and away she goes!

A simpler system would be a welcome thing, but that's how I do it for now.

The problem is that sometimes the seeded AP version is up first. For instance, an article can come up on a localized AP state news feed and get seeded, then later is picked up by the AP national wire and is posted again by Newsvine. In that case, Newsvine's own posting would be the unintentional duplicate.

Of course the easiest thing would be to be able to hit the seed button at anytime during your surfing day - and have newsvine automatically check to see if that article has already been seeded. If such a future brillian newsvine AI found a dupe, it would simply ignore my "new seed" and would instead add one vote to the article.

One thing to consider about various major sources though, is that they might provide their own reporting and supplement it with AP coverage. It's possible that by eliminating some of these major sources, simply because they have AP content, some tidbit not presented elsewhere could be overlooked.

I suppose in that case, it would be the responsibility of the "seeder" to specify in his/her summary what that specific tidbit is.

Perhaps in the same light as drhunderwasser suggested, perhaps instead of simply ignoring a seed which is a duplicates, the comments of the seed could be automatically combined and posted under the article in a simmular fashion to the comment posted here.

you would think by comparing the link address you could simply ensure that articles from the same site were not re-seeded however, sometime various publications print the same material. So long as a comparison to articles in AP or other major news distributors were included, the filtering should be pretty straight forward.

Just a thought...

Perhaps Newsvine should do something similar to what Google's GMAIL does with conversation e-mails. Group all duplicate articles together, but still make them viewable, rather than have them all floating around out there, have one header article with all the duplicates available for view by link within the header or footer of that article page. Just a thought, but I think it'd work very nicely.

Alex,

I think that and an addition for a "Duplicate Story" on the (!) tab would be nice.

If you'll permit me to "vine"... I think your insights and concerns provide the perfect lead in to my post Can "vining" evolve us to the next level?"

I'm guessing that people reseed articles to get them on their personal news page. I do this so that I can share stories with friends or to keep stories that I can view later. I assume that's what the "Make Private" checkbox is supposed to be used for, when you reseed an article, but it doesn't seem to work. When I check it, the articles doesn't seem to show up on my news page.

If someone seeds an article already on Newsvine 'as is' then fine call it a a dupe. But if they seed with their own point of view or additional information then I think that should be allowed. I do think Alex Killby has a good idea about grouping the re-seeded articles like gmail does with 'conversations', that way if I find the news article I can see additonal views and links about it.

I think there should definitely be some sort of search for dupes feature that is part of the "Seed Newsvine" Firefox toolbar button/applet thingy. There must would also be some way of checking for dupes. Having some sort of background process pulling the linked article HTML and doing some sort of full text analysis would probably do the job. However I'm not sure how well that would scale if/when Newsvine becomes popular.

UnlivedPhalanx writes:

Alex,

I think that and an addition for a "Duplicate Story" on the (!) tab would be nice.

At first I liked your idea that it should be the Newsvine user community that identifies the duplicates. To avoid errors though or the risk of malicious linking of unrelated articles there should be a minimum of say 3 reportings before an article gets associated with its duplicates.

This is probably a better system that having it done automatically by the Newsvine software - much greater risk of error. The only other option is for Newsvine staff to do that but that would probably be too slow and costly.