Forever, NS has been about having conversations.

This has always been a fundamental core of what we do, but over the last four years we’ve focused heavily on ramping up the content-sharing systems. When we break it down, NS is good at four things:

Taken from our whiteboard planning session.

Photos, Videos and Discussion, you already know how to use. Each of these sections will remain exactly the same as they were before.

News is going through a drastic overhaul, but that is simply to allow for regular users to have access to creating news, and sharing external news stories that they have written elsewhere. The News now has general galleries which allow you to see by ‘latest’ or ‘top rated’ just like in the photo and video galleries. If you have a story you feel needs telling, dive in there and tell it.

The default view on the homepage is simply a mashed up view of everything on the site, organized by its ‘hotness’. Those who don’t want to hang out in a specific section, will be able to just drop in and see only the best stuff as decided by the community. Those who want to curate the content can go to a specific section and rate everything, or use the navigation bar to change the homepage view to only display specific types of content you like.

These buttons allow you to change your view. On the right side of the same bar, you can save your default view.

Those who want to create content can jump into a section, publish their content and share it out for the world to see.

So get in there and give it a try, whether you’re going to start a conversation, write news, upload a video, publish a photo or share an amazing news post you made at your own website.

If you’re a consumer, then get in there and vote. Together, we now decide who the new rockstars of media are.

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