Vancouver-based news bookmarking and citizen journalism site NowPublic relaunched its website earlier this month and added a few new features that Mashable picked up on today. The new site design is less conservative that it's predecessor and better reflects the irreverence and personality of NowPublic's members. Speaking of members, the most significant new feature is the introduction of a member ranking system. Members collect NowPublic points for site participation - the more a user contributes to the news community, whether it be through comments, uploads and other submissions, the higher a user can be ranked. NowPublic has also incorporated user feedback into the rankings to eliminate the most active contributors from automatically rising to the top of the heap. It's nice to see that NowPublic is rewarding members who are supporting the community by helping out other members as well as those who have the largest number of fans following them. NowPublic's new 'presence stream' feature recognizes that their members are often more active on sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter. By allowing members to sync their NowPublic presence stream with these sites, they're found another way to leverage existing content on the Web.
NowPublic is a participatory news network which mobilizes an army of reporters to cover the events that define our world. In twelve short months,... [more]
Rob Lewis
Rob is the President of Techvibes Media Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of Techvibes.com.
His diverse background includes stints in International Trade Finance, Web Development, and Enterprise Software and he is a graduate of the University of British Columbia, British Columbia Institute of Technology, and Simon Fraser University.
When not blogging on...[more]
