Give me a Newgie

There are many options for getting your news now -- television, the websites of news agencies like CNN and NYTimes, Yahoo, RSS feeds, email, MySpace and so on. Some people still read newspapers! A new way to get news is to use Newgie.com which figures out which are the important news stories by monitoring page views, recommendations and favorites to assemble the news. They do this for hundreds of categories of news, so you'll be able to find what you want and customize things based on what you want to read. Newgie has Categories -- things like Sports, Entertainment and so on, Communities - created by users of the site and Feeds which come from news organizations like CNN, CNET, Yahoo, etc. to organize your news. You've got three good options there to find relevant news quickly.

I like the idea of ranking the news based on interest and I think this will work well if there are a large group of users, particularly in the Communities category. If you have some people with expertise, it could be a nice way to get the important stories in a particular area. If you get lots of people with a single minded view of things, it might not offer a broad enough selection, but the idea is that a larger group will mitigate against narrowcasting.

The site is easy to use and not too complicated. I'm glad they don't use terms likeRSS and instead call things Feeds, which won't scare off people who aren't as technically savvy. Overall, the site looks interesting and I will give it a try myself.