Last month I wrote about the New Newspaper. In that article I discussed the on-line versions of printed newspapers. The advantage of these on-line newspapers are the are available instantaneously, as soon as they are written and published. However, with those on-line newspapers, everyone gets the same news pages. But people have different interests and likes, so what one person might be interested in may not interest others. Once again, through the “magic” of the web, this problem is solved. Everyone can get news or stories that they are personally interested in. Basically, everyone can get their own personalized newspaper. An example of this custom news(paper) is what is provided by Google News which can be found at http://news.google.com/.
If you have a Google account (e.g. GMail account), you can customize Google News to your liking. For example, I would like to have as a default, news about Hawaii, so I easily added in to my page a Hawaii section.
My news page is created each time I request it. However, it only changes each time there are new stories written and Google has discovered these new articles.
Google has takes this to another level. Your Google News service learns from your request and refines what it creates for you. For example if you always asking or reading about techie stuff, Google will present you with more stories on techie stuff the next time you ask for your news. Also since Google is the king of search engines, it doesn’t only provide you stories from other papers or official news sources but links to magazines and company web pages. They use their sophisticated ranking engine to help shift through the millions of articles so that you get the most pertinent links.
Another customizable aggregator site is called Netvibes and can be found at: http://www.netvibes.com/. It has the ability to get news of your choice but it also adds in other things that normally would be classified as a “Widget”. For example you can have a custom page which allows you to read your GMail and Facebook messages along with watching your E-Bay information.
There are similar “newspapers” from My Yahoo and AOL, so if you don’t like Google News, you have some other choices. However, although you can customize your pages, they don’t have the ability to learn from your click throughs.
Presently, the printed Newspapers are a $50+ billion business but with the advent of the Internet and these aggregator news sites, that traditional business is surely on the skids. Take at these sites and see if you prefer getting your news this way.
