Similarly to Shvoong, Shortnews.com provides user-written summaries
of current news as they happen.
The news submissions are checked by
staff to weed out sensationalizing,
advertizing or spam content. The
Shortnews.com’s is driven by Java technology,
which also handles the
news submission procedure, the spell checking, hyperlink
and the prerequisite search for similar news.
The Shortnews.com is also
a forum, due to a news post being the anchor
for a thread, and the fellow users being able to leave a chain of comments.
The Shortnews users earn points when signing in, leaving comments, rating a
news post, being rated at any level above acceptable, and having click-throughs
leading to their news post.
100 points is awarded for an
accepted news post, 50 for signing in once a day,
20 points for a
comment, for a news rated, as well as having own news rated,
and 10 for a short, non-productive rating.
The Shortnews is a well-indexed and categorized content, offering automatically
packaged channels
(Current Events, Regional, Society and Culture, Recreation,
Politics, Science, Health, Entertainment, Economy, High Tech, Automotive and
Sports) of news that are sorted into the most recent, the most quality
and the most popular, tabbed views.
Shortnews.com has
prepackaged 2 to 3 newsticker applets, containing the most
popular news
from the site itself, which can be readily added onto any website.
RSS feed options are also available.
The users of the Shortnews tend
to be younger people typically having 100 to
500 points, and whose news
writing is flavored with street colloquialisms, mostly
due to the effort to rewrite the original news content. Very often flame wars
erupt in the comment threads under news posts, wherein moderators are
known to delete offensive or dirty language.
Quality news
posts seem to be generated by articulate old-timers who
avoid forum wars,
and tend to have accumulated well over 100,000 points.
A team of
British, Australian, and American expatriates monitor the content on this German-hosted site around the clock.
The overall feel of Shortnews.com is that of a sleek, well-engineered news
service and a community forum.