For quite some time I’ve had a NewPR link in my footer, so that people can submit my posts on the NewPR site. However, I just discovered, the NewPR site doesn’t even exist anymore. Or rather, it does, but it’s been completely reworked, and I don’t like it.
NewPR used to be quite a neat idea: a Digg-clone, but for the PR community. This made it akin to a vertical search engine, in that it provided a good resource of quality content for a specific topic.
But it’s changed. Now, instead of seeing a nice, functional page entitled ‘News for the people, by the people’, I get what I would, if I were less educated in such matters, call ‘a load of marketing bollocks’. It looks like Salesforce have taken it over and are trying to convert it into a community-based ‘ideas’ resource.
Problem is, it looks all wrong. It doesn’t ‘look’ like a Digg, or even a Twitter, or even a del.icio.us – that is, not like a resource that gets you up, running and in the thick of a community and its content asap. It’s packaged too much like an application and has ‘a load of marketing bollocks’ forming a barrier between me and what I want to look at.
The proposition at the top – ‘Leverage the Power of Community to Bubble the Best Ideas to the Top’ – puts me off right away, not least because I hate the word leverage. And, believe me, I want to blah-blah the power of community blah-blah, and I was once able to on NewPR, but not anymore.
So, it’s bye-bye NewPR. Pity. It was such a good idea someone else should re-invent it.
I tried Crispy early on, but it seemed as though it was one of those things where a small community was sharing the same people over and over.
I wasn’t one of those people, and the people being shared were already in my feeds. And I knew about the posts already, usually through Twitter.
Twitter killed CrispyNews before Salesforce sold it out.
Was Salesforce behind it originally? It’s still a pity though. I think some subject areas are tailor-made for having their own ‘flavour’ of Twitter, and PR is one of them.