I just got my beta account for Newsvine. It’s very slick, despite some performance issues, and I think it has a lot going for it in the citizens-media realm. (I’m even more convinced after hearing last week’s Inside the Net interview with Mike Davidson, who claims they’re working on rich media tools, as well.) The problem that I’m having, and I’m assuming others are as well, is that I have no idea how to use my Newsvine column. I’ve written before about having too many places to blog, and now I’ve got one more.

I want to use Newsvine’s column feature, because I think it would be help me get wider exposure (and maybe even some ad revenue), but I’m also sensitive about writing anything of value that’s not being added to my main blog. I can add my Newsvine headlines through Javascript, but I think I need to make some kind of judgement call about what content goes where. Plus, after bookmarking all sorts of things in del.icio.us for over a year, I’m not sure I’d gain value by switching to aanother service. (Yes, I realize Digg and Newsvine are more about collecting news than saving bookmarks, but I don’t want to have to make that distinction at the time of bookmarking.)

So, I’m not sure how to use Newsvine, but I’m going to experiment a bit. First experiment: I’m going to cross-post this to both my Newsvine column and my standard ProphecyBoy blog.

One last thought, about bookmarking services. - bookmarklets are not helpful if you’re using RSS. I read nearly all my news in NetNewsWire, which means that if I want to add something to del.icio.us, Digg, or Newsvine, I first have to first open it in Safari or Firefox. This is annoying, and means that I don’t bookmark as often as I should. All of these services should realize that most of their hardcore users use RSS heavily, and thus aren’t using a standard browser most of the time. We want to use your services, so please make it easy on us! Bookmarklet support in the desktop RSS clients would be helpful, a context item would be even better. Or a dock icon, where I can drop links…?