How will Newsvine grow a global following?

Interesting idea. I think it would help if there were some sort of user list for news vine. I don't even know how big our current user base is ...

I think that the current "geekness" of the user-base is due to the fact that early adopters of a new service on the web are most likely to be tech-savy users.
I think that the most effective (only?) way to attract other kinds of users are - right now - the Associated Press articles. The majority of the articles written/seeded by users is tech-related, because right now technology is the subject that users know better. This also means that Newsvine is a great place to find tech-related news, but is maybe lacking in other fields. It is a vicious circle and I don't think time alone will solve this.
The AP news are, IMO, the only way to break the circle and attract users who will ultimately start to write about non-tech stuff.

Yes, most articles are tech-related. But there ARE a lot of articles which have different political agendas. As I'm very interested in this field, I go look for it and surprise, you CAN find a whole lotta different stuff. If you're not interested in techie-stuff, use the different categories or just search for a tag.

I read use Newsvines as a one-stop for news of all kinds...just had time to really explore and take advantage of the "interativeness" of it all.

I love how newsvine is right now.

I suspect localisation and personalisation, through the use of tags and other add-ons, will help people get more from newsvine as it develops. Its strengths, for mine, are in its fundamentally strong categorisation.

I'm not a technophile and I get a lot from the service already.

There won't be elections in Myanmar. Not for a very long time.

On the globalization issue, I agree that much of what's on here is U.S.-centric (not just tech-centric). That may or may not change.

It may change once the community grows more international and more people write about, say, the EU.

Or it may not change because the AP wire is itself pretty U.S.-focused and what passes for "world news" is the world seen through the eyes of a specific set of countries (the U.S., the U.K.). It's also in the nature of wire stories is not to give much in the way of substantive analysis. If the universe of commentable sources expands, so might the global nature of the service.

Personally, even though I dabble quite heavily in web development, I don't consider myself a tech-head by a long-shot. I've only been a member here for a day and haven't yet sent any invites out directly, although I have done minimal canvassing. But when I do use those invites, I suspect very few will go to "tech-community" types.

Still, a closed site is a difficult thing to promote. I think I'm going to write a piece on an idea how to overcome that.

Build it they will come

I plan to write about situations in Hungary, like everything what happens here and I think it could be interesting for the outside, e.g. not reporting about every car accident around the corner. If people like my writing, probably they will point up them, thus I will see writing has sense and wont abandon it.

If other writers around the globe from smaller countries do the same, your idea will come true.

I think you'll also find the base will grow out from articles that are seeded here that go beyond traditional media outlets (i.e. users blogs).

I personally found the site when I noticed newsvine showing up in my webstats as a referral. Came to the site, and registered to get in on the Beta out of curiosity. I'm sure the growth will move organically from techie to web-savy to joe user as momentum builds.