
I've been getting quite a few reports by users complaining of seeded links that are 'not news' or are just done improperly. I've also been contacting users individually with some tips on getting the hang of seeding Newsvine. I'm no angel. It took a little while to get the hang of it. I thought I'd write a post here to detail a few tips on how to write an effective seed, so you can get those votes that will in turn get you to the top of The Vine. Here goes:
- Seed more news. Although some things are very helpful and add value, these things are not always 'news'. This post is an example. There is nothing wrong with seeding a helpful tutorial once in a while. However, start by trying to seed some news articles you find interesting. A good ratio of news-related seeding to other types of seeding is a recipe for good readership.
- Seed the article itself, rather than the front page of a blog or website. Also, seed from the source and not from your own blog (please see Newsvine Code Of Honor).
- Edit your headline by stripping out text such as "..... - ESPN.com - December 10, 2005". This will make your headline more natural and will not detract from what the article is actually about.
- Do not use all caps in your headline, the content itself should be concise and interesting enough to get attention.
- Write a concise lead-in using the text field "Your Comment:". This will help people understand what the saved link is about and why they should visit it. It also orients users who want to read or participate in comment threads and chat. A good method is to start by saying what the article is about and to finish off by saying what your take on it is (if any) and perhaps asking others for their views on the subject or event. Please do not use web addresses (e.g., http://.....).
- Add relevant tags to your seeded link using commas to separate words and phrases. This will allow your seeded link to be visible from more places around Newsvine. For example, a story about the Seahawks tagged 'sports' will only show up on one page. If you tag it 'sports, nfl, football, seattle, seattle seahawks, hawks', your seeded link will show up on five tag pages plus the Sports category, and thus gain more chance of readership and interaction.
- Visit the discussion your seeded link starts by visiting 'Your History'. You are the caretaker/moderator of the content you contribute to The Vine, so help people out by keeping the discussion on-topic and deleting inappropriate comments on your comment threads (though this action should be used sparingly and appropriately).
The better we become at this, collectively, the more we'll all get out of Newsvine as a source for news and information. There are already many Newsvine users who have figured out great ways to Seed Newsvine effectively. If you have anything to share in addition to what I've posted here, please share!
A few more tips:
- if the seed newsvine window has a green header, the link you are seeding is new to The Vine.
- if the header is orange, you are trying to seed content from within Newsvine to Newsvine itself. There isn''''t much point to this other than the fact that the story is added to ''''your clippings''''. (accessible via "Your History")
- if the header is red, you are trying to seed a link that has already been seeded by someone else. You can still do this, but it will only show up in your column, and the person who seeded it previously will be credited as the seeder everywhere else it appears. A good thing to do if you see red is to ''''jump to existing discussion'''' where you can add a comment to the seeded link.
*** This system is not perfect since a lot of the same stories can be coming from different URLs, in which case we don''t have a way to identify this. We''re working on a solution to the duplicate problem, but its a sticky problem.
mbbx6spp, thanks for the comment. Can you please clarify your question? Are you referring to the process of seeding or writing an article? Also, are you referring to the ability to include a link, such as this?
*** This system is not perfect since a lot of the same stories can be coming from different URLs, in which case we don''t have a way to identify this. We''re working on a solution to the duplicate problem, but its a sticky problem.
Doppleganger seems to be pretty good at detecting duplicates (as an extreme case of "related article". I assume you've considered this as a strategy, but mention it just in case :)
Actually, that is exactly how we detect duplicates. Doppelganger does double-duty.
Guess that means your first comment above concerning dupe detection is now obsolete. Cool.
Great set of tips, thanks.
On quoting text from the article in the comments field when seeding: do it - don't do it?
Thank you for this article. I cannot figure out how to seed an article. I got the red header advising me to seed the article and not the website. No idea how to do that.
Thanks for the tips! I definately will use this when seeding from now on.
I'm of the opinion that the field "Your Comment" should really be something like "Your Summary", because I'd much rather read something like
New York's transit workers end strike The city's mass transit strike ended yesterday after union leaders, facing mounting fines, possible jail terms and the wrath of millions of commuters, voted to return their 33,000 members to work without a new contract.
Than something like:
New York's transit workers end strike I for one am glad the strike is over, it was really inconvenient!
The difference is - the second example is my personal take on the story (which people dont want to read), while the first gives the "gist" of what someone is about to read, which is very informative.
Okay the green/orange/red thing's gotta be new. I've never seen or known about that. Super cool.
(And I completely agree with Rob: A quick summary of the article is better than a comment about it.)
That's a good idea Rob, "Your comment" might not be the correct label.
i think this was very good as i know it has helped me out a bit more now.
Or at least do a summary and then after it do your comment on it.
I forsee the tags feature really being abused once its public. What's to stop users from "spamming" article tags with completely unrelevant tags just in order to get more views?
Kai, though its a little off topic from seeding, I agree, we have to address the issue of improper tagging. That bush article earlier today was getting out of hand. We have a few ideas on how to deal with it.
search before you seed something. there have been quite a few of these, a simple search can stop this.
Jeff W is correct. Though we have a system in place to handle duplicate seeded links from the same source, sometimes the same AP stories are found on multiple sites. We will likely add 'duplicate link' to the reporting system to address this issue.
An entirely minor detail, but it would be helpful if the text field for "Your Comment" was larger.
It would also be nice if there was a preview as we have for reader comments.
Now, if something was seeded earlier and didn't get much attention should we reseed it? Or is it unlike Digg where if it's old yet gets new votes we can bring it back to the frontpage? Or would it be considered old news and reseeding it would do nothing?
Another thing slightly unrelated: being able to follow seeded articles not only by tags, but also by author. It makes sense that, after a little bit of time, one will find people with affinity for certain subjects, and following the author rather than the tag could be very useful. Being able to search auhors more easily would be helpful too.
eloisa, we are working on author search. If you do come across an author you like in the meantime, you can click their name or avatar and get to their column where you can add them to your watchlist. You can even watch only certain topics they write about. For instance tang.newsvine.com/science, yields all the science items I've contributed and can be added to your watchlist. This can be done with any Newsvine user and any AP author. Try it out.
CarL, most likely if something was seeded previously and didn't get much attention it won't the second time around, unless events have made it relevant again. You are welcome to seed if this is the case but the item will only show up in your column and the date of the original seed will remain the same (and thus make it unlikely to gain popularity). If events have made a topic relevant again, there are likely new articles about that subject and you can seed those new articles. You can also always write a post.
Panda, we've tossed around the idea of making the comment field larger, however we want to keep seeded link lead-in text short and concise. By doing so we'll encourage people who have a lot to say on a subject to write a post instead. You can still provide links in your post, even to multiple articles if needed. As with most things, this is just the approach we are starting with, if there are recurring requests for this (or any other things) we are definitely open to changing the way things work around here to suit all of your needs and preferences. We're just getting started =)
You can even watch only certain topics they write about. For instance tang.newsvine.com/science, yields all the science items I've contributed and can be added to your watchlist.
This is great functionality, Calvin! But it is not obvious that the "Add to Watchlist" link on tang.newsvine.com/science will add a watch to only your science items -- it's placement next to your picture implies that I'm you and not just your science items. I'd suggest either changing the wording (e.g. "Add Calvin's science articles to your watchlist") or change its placement.
This leads me to a wish item: it would be nice to give prolific authors/seeders their own version of the Newsvine category bar at the top of their column, dynamically populated with the categories/tags of their contributions. This feature could be used instead of or in addition to the "Articles & Seeds By Tag" column component.
I second this! The question would be... most used tags, or most-recently used tags?
I was thinking that it would excactly parallel the main Newsvine category bar -- do you know if it's most used or most recently used there? I suspect it's the latter. But you're right, it's not obvious which would work better.
I'm leaning toward most-used tags, since there isn't much point to having a tab on the bar for a tag that has only one or two articles. If that article is recent enough, it will show near the top of its top-level category (e.g. politics, sports).
Could get the best of both worlds by highlighting categories/tags in the bar with recent articles in red?
These are some great ideas. I'll point Mike D. in the direction of these (he's the designer behind Newsvine).
I know that it's considered OK to do self promotion and that you will be having autoseeding of blogs thru feeds, but my question is, what constitutes a good seed to my own blog?
Right now my current posting method on my blog is to do a quick recap of an article, include the relevant text, and then have my commentary below it. So it's a bit of an article mashup, ocassionaly combining 3-5 sources. Should I seed this? Or should I only seed 100% original content from my blog?
You can check it out at http://earthsentinel.com to get a better idea.
Thanks,
Nick
Nick, first off let me convey my appreciation for the fact that you both thought about it and asked before actually acting. I just deleted a post that consisted in its entirety of "askjkajs". Seriously. To answer your question, we think its great if you want to seed articles from elsewhere that consist of newsworthy content. If this happens to be your blog and you think the post would add value and evoke discussion here on Newsvine then please go ahead and seed it with a concise lead-in to orient users to the nature of the article.
From looking at your site, the other option is to post the article in its entirety using the write a post feature. It appears that you have quite a good number of insights relating to events around the world. We appreciate users with the ability to distill world events into words with clarity along with cogent personal analyses. We do not, at this time, plan on providing the users with the option of autoseeding blogs via feeds. The reason being that plenty of blog posts are not necessarily appropriate news items. We deem it necessary to put that extra step in there, even if its just a cut-and-paste, of having the author think about whether or not the content belongs on The Vine.
Just wrote my own post about duplicates and then saw this. So I have maybe duplicated a discussion in a discussion of duplicates... Didn't know about the red/green thingy before. Seems cool if it works.
Nevertheless, I've found some dupes that were the same link seeded more than once. I pointed out the urls of an example in my posting on the subject, of the Engadget coverage of Macworld. The same link was seeded more than once, dividing up discussion. Others I've seen were AP stories, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt that those came from different sources.
For me as a user, the best way to seed Newsvine is to be out there on the interweb itself reading stuff and then seeding it back to Newsvine. I imagine, though, that method causes lots of dupes. Maybe there's some value to the headlines/descriptions that people attach to their dupe seeds? Maybe those could be aggregated in one place, along with the discussion of the article?
I get it now. Looks like the system doesn't recognize urls as duplicates when the same url comes with www (http://www.engadget...) and without it (http://engadget...).
Might want to look into that. But at least duplicates are going to be limited to two as is.
I believe we need a way to _edit— a seed. Because the "headline / link" order doesn't jibe with how my brain works, I reversed them on my second "seed." I could find no way to edit the "non-linked seed" -- so I recreated it correctly. However, neither can I find a way to _delete— the first one.
My big question is: how can you tell whether an item you're looking at has been seeded already? Or picked up by the automated syndication? I wouldn't want to create duplicates on the site.
You actually can edit your seeds, but the link is a bit difficult to find. Go into the main seed itself, and in your "user bar" just above the article, you should see a link that says "click here to edit this link."
Hello Calvin,
Thanks a bunch for the reply and a link here, highly appreciated! :D
Have tried seeding some news, and the color headers worked brilliantly. Thanks again.
When seeding, is there a way to determine commonly used tags? For example, I would hate to tag something with 'ie' when the tag 'internet-explorer' is more common.
Bernard, we will be adding an auto-complete function to tagging, similar to the one employed in the region dropdown. So, when you start typing you will see the list of common tags in the order of most frequently used.
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