NewsBlocks launches Blockchain-based trusted news platform
Revolutionary news-is-data approach takes news out of the paper age
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND — October 1, 2018: The Social News Company Ltd. launches NewsBlocks, a revolutionary blockchain platform for building next-generation news applications, such as trusted news sites, fact-checking systems, fake news detectors, and much more.
NewsBlocks starts from the insight that the traditional news article — a form of news designed to be printed on paper and thrown away each day — is not well suited to the digital age of mobile, instant data.
NewsBlocks’ primary goal is to convert all the world’s news articles — past, present, and future — into data, and store it permanently on a tamper-proof, censorship-resistant blockchain, where it can be searched, sorted, filtered and organised by anyone in new ways.
For example, a newspaper article about a Yoko Ono art exhibition opening held today, will likely mention that the artist was married to John Lennon in 1969, and that he was murdered in 1980. NewsBlocks extracts these three news events, converts them to data, and links them to each other. As more NewsBlocks are added, the world’s largest archive of interlinked news events is created.
Mark Devlin, CEO, “Once news is data, it can — for the first time — be verified and stored permanently on a censorship-resistant blockchain. Anyone can then retrieve the data and organise it in new ways, building the next generation of trusted news applications”.
The company’s own application, called Newslines, organises NewsBlocks into interactive news timelines (‘newslines’) about any topic. For example, 2,000 NewsBlocks are organised into the world’s largest interactive news archive for Conor McGregor, the UFC fighter. As more newslines are added, the Company says it can become a social news network that can take the place of Facebook, as that site abandons news.
Because each piece of data also has a price, NewsBlocks also creates the first global marketplace for news data. This gives an incentive to contributors who add news: they are rewarded with NewsBlocks tokens, a cryptocurrency, when apps pay for data. High-demand news pays more.
The company is planning a token sale (ICO) for Q1, 2019, that aims to raise funds to build the blockchain network, pay contributors to add news, and support developers to build NewsBlocks apps.
About The Social News Company Ltd.
The Social News Company Ltd. was founded in 2016 by Mark & Mary Devlin. The couple left Scotland in 1989 to work in Japan, where they founded Metropolis, Japan’s №1 English magazine, and japantoday.com, the world’s leading news and discussion site about Japan in English. The Devlins returned to the UK in 2016 to work on Newslines, a social news network that gives readers the complete news history of any topic, and NewsBlocks, the world’s first blockchain platform for trusted news applications.
