NowPublic.com aims to be the YouTube of news, with more than 30,000 citizen journalists in 130 countries adding their own comments, photos, videos and audio files to news stories pulled from mainstream-media sites and blogs. For fast-breaking stories, NowPublic becomes a valuable journalistic resource -- during Hurricane Katrina, for example, it had more reporters in the area than most news organizations have on their entire staffs. The rest of the time, it's a way for readers and bloggers to call attention to news items they find important, alarming, wonderful or simply weird.

NowPublic features all the usual social networking tools like tags and ratings. Yesterday, it added a new tool called Highlight -- a Firefox extension that makes it easy to republish snippets of news from media sites along with headlines and comments. Highlight generates tags automatically and can be configured to post the story simultaneously to the subscriber's blog.