One Year on the Vine: A Good Day

Well, it’s been one year. 100 articles. 2448 seeds. 4690 comments. 19303 votes. It was on this date in 2006 that I first contributed to the vine.

Oh, the system may say that I’ve been here since January 19th, but like most of you I lurked for a while. Actually, I don’t think that is true. I think I signed up and then forgot about newsvine. I was invited by a friend who explained newsvine to me as a site where users wrote the news.

Well, I didn’t feel that I would be writing all that much news, so I didn’t think all that much about newsvine.

Sure, if newsvine was around a year or two earlier I would have been on the front line of some kick ass citizen journalism. My college was the focus of some national media attention for first hiring a convicted terrorist, Susan Rosenberg, as an “activist in resident” and later inviting 9/11 critic Ward Churchill to speak. When a small college in Upstate New York warrants Fox News reporters not once, but twice in a year, there was clearly some prime potential newsvine fodder at hand.

But alas, this was some time before the vine, and what person finds their self in the middle of a controversy such as that more than twice in their life. Thus it looked as if my newsvine career was going to consist of signing up and nothing more.

And then it happened. A comedy event that I was hosting as a member of the Campus Activities Board was streaked. This may not seem like much, but this was Greg Giraldo, who at the time did have his own Comedy Central show. And this was our undefeated Varsity Streaking Team who had already been featured by multiple media outlets including Sports Illustrated, Fox News, ESPN.com, the New York Times and Playboy. I figured that if all those outlets could cover them, then I could at least write a little blurb and post it to newsvine. A monster was born.

I would never again attempt to write “the news,” but that surely didn’t stop me from writing whatever popped into my mind.

So here I am now, one year later. I must say that this has been one of my top days on the vine. I didn’t seed all that much today. My writing is limited to just what you are reading now. However, I participated in some of the best conversations in all my time here, just today.

Should Jesus follow through on his promise? by ScooterDMan, has easily been the most rational, calm and enlightening discussion of religion that I have participated in on newsvine to date.

Polls: What Do Liberal and Conservative Mean on Newsvine? by Ardith, has spawned a collegial discussion of the labels, “liberal” and “conservative” and their meaning in both the real world and newsvine.

Sam Clemmons’ Is Fox News Biased Or Are You? Read And Be Your Own Judge has sparked a debate on media bias, as will as a healthy critique of the methodology used within the study at question within the article.

All in all, it’s been a good day, and a good year on newsvine. Here’s to a a few more.