Experience a New Way to Get Your News and Save Time

I'm not a news junkie, although at one time one could say I was having spent several years as a documentary photographer. These days I find my stomach turning as I watch the many 'Barbie and Ken' newsreaders putting on airs of journalism, and so I often times miss stories of interest.

Okay, all that aside I recently read a post on www.makeusof.com about ways to enhance and energize following the news. Here are a couple of news gathering sites to tickle your fancy:

Spectra (http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/components/spectra/index.html) is presenting a whole new way of reading the news. Instead of scanning a vertical page, you flip through headlines and images to find out what story you’re most interested in reading. You can choose the channels that interest you - Sports, Technology, Politics, and the like - and then flip through that day’s MSNBC headlines with Spectra. If you only want news on a particular topic, you can search headlines by word. Clicking on a headline will take you to the full story, and you can save or share stories right from Spectra.

The Newsmap (http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm) is essentially a mashup of newspapers with social media. Using Google News, Newsmap aggregates stories, and presents headlines based on the number of stories reported on a given issue. The larger the headline, the more press it’s being given. If you’ve only got about 10 seconds, but want to get a sense of what’s going on in the world, Newsmap’s the way to do it. The stories are colored by topic, sized by popularity, and darkened by relevance - dark squares are older stories.

You can sort the results by category (Business, Entertainment, Nation, etc.), or by country around the world. Newsmap’s a great way to compare what the world is talking about, and to see in a simple and visual way what’s going on in your country and around the world. Watercooler preparation’s never been so easy.


So go ahead and have some fun with these sites and let me know what you discover!