To start with, you can users can upload their own news stories or seed news stories from other news websites. Newsvine.com provides “Seed Newsvine” button that users can add to their browser toolbar, now whenever the user reads a interesting story they’d like to publish, they have to simply hit the ‘Seed Newsvine” button.

Who decides which news story should appear on homepage? Well you and other readers decide that. Each news story carries ‘Vote’ Button, if you like the story, simply hit it and promote it. The stories with maximum votes make it to the first page or ‘Top of the Vine’ list

Users can also comment on each news story, which now is a standard feature of all content websites. But at Newvine, you can also discuss the story with other users in real time using the live chat.

And that’s not all, you can even setup your own column and Newsine will share with you,  90% of all advertising revenue generated from your column.

Newsvine.com can change the way we read and discuss the news. Will look forward to hearing your comments on newsvine.com and on any similar online properties out there

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Chetan Asher, Chief Executive Officer of Tonic Media profiles some of the hottest emerging web properties that are reinventing web experience.  His criteria for picking these properties is simple, they have innovative concepts, are focused on enhancing the user experience and are truly harnessing the power of Internet.

Extremely addictive and pretty handy, Last.fm is an intelligent social music platform. Last.fm has an exhaustive library of tracks by established and emerging artists that users can listen to. Users can share their play lists and can view what users are listening to.

But that’s not all; Last.fm tracks each user’s musical taste and recommends music based on their individual preferences. It will also connect users who have similar music preferences and help them network.

Its Audioscrobbler tool, will also track what a user is listening on its computer or Ipod and update music prefences to their profiles on Last.fm website. Hence a user is not limited by listening to only streams available on the website.

Last.fm is a great platform to discover new music from the genres that you like and meet new people who share the same taste in music as you do.

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Chetan Asher, Chief Executive Officer of Tonic Media profiles some of the hottest emerging web properties that are reinventing web experience.  His criteria for picking these properties is simple, they have innovative concepts, are focused on enhancing the user experience and are truly harnessing the power of Internet.

If you want to virtually explore any destination and get a feel of the local milieu before actually traveling there, then GeoBeats has the solution.

The best thing about GeoBeats travel videos is that they are produced by experienced filmmakers from over 45 countries, which make up their network. The videos have interesting story angles and they successfully capture the local flavor of that particular destination. Most videos have a travel guide that takes you through the city / town in turn offering a barrage of information. It’s like taking a virtual guided tour which helps you plan the perfect trip. The GeoBeats videos are surely a notch higher than several travel videos that flood varied websites.

The site also offers the ‘GeoBeats Travel Player’ enabling individual websites / blogs to embed travel videos from the GeoBeats portfolio. To give you an example and the chance to sample the videos, I have embedded a clip on the city of Jaipur in India.

The player streams videos comfortably and offers hi-end video quality.

On the flip side, GeoBeats has limited destinations, for example I couldn’t find any videos on Caribbean Islands. But with constant additions to their library they may cover most destinations slowly but surely.

Video content is all set to emerge as mainstream content on the web in near future and websites like GeoBeats are making this shift happen.

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Chetan Asher, Chief Executive Officer of Tonic Media profiles some of the hottest emerging web properties that are reinventing web experience.  His criteria for picking these properties is simple, they have innovative concepts, are focused on enhancing the user experience and are truly harnessing the power of Internet.

Kicking off the series by profiling the visual shopping search engine – Like.com

How many times have you spent long frustrating hours looking for a particular pattern of shirt or a particular shape of bag in a different color? Surely quite often, looking for a particular product can be very frustrating. Here’s where Like.com comes to your rescue.

You can search for a particular product by typing your requirement for e.g.’ Lime green chequered shirt’ or simply upload a photo of a similar product using their ‘Likethis’ feature and voila! Like.com will find products similar to your photo or description from over 200 shopping sites.

That’s not all, if you like a particular aspect from your search results, you can simply highlight that particular element and the visual search engine will further refine products from your search that match your highlighted criteria.

What makes this so interesting, is that now one can simply take a photo of an old sneaker, upload it and find exactly similar products in just a few minutes. No more lounging around from shop to shop, no sweat if the local stores don’t store it anymore.

Just use the phone camera, take a photo, upload and refine your criteria and you have deals from several online retailers on products of your choice. You could also upload a picture of particular movie star wearing your favourite sunglasses and search for a similar product.

In a nutshell, you can search for products based on a particular visual, color, pattern, detail and even material.

Like.com offers search for apparels, bags, watches, jewellery, accessories, cosmetics, fragrances and even rugs and posters.

Like.com is founded by a company called Riya, which is focussed on visual computing.