Last night, I listened to Amber Macarthur and Leo Laporte's podcast about Newsvine.com. It's a new social news website that people are getting are excited about.

Like digg.com and del.icio.us the content is prioritised by means of user votes - no editors. However, unlike digg and del.icio.us, it's not just a swamp of user submited stories. Newsvine has two streams of news: 'the vine' - user submited stories, editorials, and comments....and 'the wire' - hard news from Reuters, AFP, etc. With it's emphasis on serious, hard news, it's positioning itself to compete with BBC News online, CNN, MSNBC etc. The collective intelligence of the system is the secret sauce, not necessarily the main draw card.

Alas, it's in private beta at the moment. It's invite only.

So I check my email this morning, and what do ya know, I had an invite waiting for me in my inbox. I do love being an early adopter. I also have 20 invites of my own to bestow on those I deem worthy.

I'm really liking NewsVine so far. It's beautifully designed and feature rich. However, it'll take me a couple of weeks to decided how useful it is.