Corante Network contributors and others who've been invited to the private beta share their observations of Newsvine.

Says Stowe Boyd, whose long post includes several screen captures of the interface as well as touches on some of the legal/rights issues: "A fully featured, web 2.0 era blogging community that includes reputation, ranking, real-time chat, tagging, and 'seeding', on top of a business model that encourages people to add their value to the swarm and to bring others in... looks like it is hitting many of the important buttons."
Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman of Hypergene: "Newsvine offers a refreshing philosophy that has been missing in online news sites: Let the story not be an end in itself but a starting point for conversation and aggregation of content and different perspectives."

A feature they note: "To get the party started right, Newsvine is encouraging members to invite 20 of their friends. As an inviter, you are eligible to receive 10% of the ad earnings of any traffic they generate."

Also: "The invite-only model does not rely on manufactured scarcity of reputation, like karma found on Slashdot. Instead, it encourages community quality control right from the start."

Brian Benzinger, in a lengthy post: "I have been actually been testing the service for a couple of weeks now and find it absolutely great. I honestly haven’t enjoyed reading the news this much online ever... The environment, community, and interaction makes it unlike any other news site. I have been stuck in the zone of reading about news through services like Digg, Memeorandum, and Blogs, but I never make time to read the actual news online, but not anymore."

Scott Karp (of the Atlantic Media Company): "Here’s the real question: Who’s got time for all this?

"There’s Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, MySpace – already I’m too tired to list the dozens (maybe hundreds) of collaborative and participatory media. Surfing cable TV could consume an entire Sunday. Now we’re being asked to tag, comment, create, contribute, vote, refer, subscribe, engage, rate, report, add, chat, seed… When we’re all creating media, who’s going to be left to consume it?"

Another excerpt in the same vein: "All of this makes me wonder about unintended consequences on the horizon for media. Wiki’s and Web 2.0 applications have shown the ability of the collective intelligence to make order out of chaos, but what happens when the collective is overwhelmed by too much chaos in need of ordering. Are we witnessing a new media order, or the beginning of media entropy?"

UPDATE: Jonathan Dube adds his $.02: "[I'm impressed]... is impressed with what it's seen so far. The site is a slick combination of some of the trendiest news-related tools online now, incorporating news aggregation, social networking, citizen journalism, blogging, user ratings and online discussions. Think of it as one-part Slashdot, one-part del.icio.us and one-part Google News, with a few other neat features thrown in."