NowPublic - Now with Trust and Twitter

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.