I have written about Newsvine before, just Google this site. It continues to make great progress showing the market demand for content aggregators. There are now over 600,000 visits a month, a few more than this blog. Here is a summary taken from one of their releases. Thanks to Hylton Jolliffe for passing it on to me.
A Much Smarter Front Page puts you in control of more stuff (they say everything but that may be stretch since they do not yet do my laundry). But with can drag and drop, you can design your own front page and put stuff where you want it.
Local Headlines and Weather can be automatically displayed on your front page. Of course they envision such statements as "did you know that according to my favorite site, Newsvine, it's going to be 78 and sunny in three days?" Not likely but they can dream about it. They go on to mention that you can now make such meaningful conversation as "Did you hear Tom from the fraternity was arrested last night?" They add, “It is important to us that…you're consistently equipped for these precious moments of idle banter.”
Newsvine Groups was one of the most important updates from my view. As they said. “With over 600,000 people a month using Newsvine now, it's easy to get lost in this giant news amusement park. Well safety in numbers, we say. Create your own group or join hundreds of existing ones and connect with people who share your, ummm, "original" views on the world.” The ability to get lost in irrelevant stuff is one of the vulnerabilities of content aggregators so this feature is a good thing. The top story on the general page when I looked was “Wis. Farmer Finds New Calf Has Two Nose.” What more can I say?
Newsvine Live As they say, “Quite possibly the world's most thorough and voyeuristic news ticker, Newsvine Live feeds your nascent desire to stare at moving objects on a screen. When you see something interesting float by, just click and you're off to go read it.” Not my idea of fun but perhaps someone will like it.
The News in Pictures comes through the new Newsvine front page photo gallery. Each photo takes you to the corresponding story if you want to go beyond pictures.
External RSS Feeds is an option, You can now add any news source to your Newsvine front page . This seems fine but now they are getting away from user contributed content. Is this moving away from their niche? 
web 2.0
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