Like a lot of other nerds I go to various blog and RSS feeds and such to get the news about the stuff I care about. For “real” news I pretty much rely on google news and wikinews. Except of course for the occasional story that is so big it filters into the geek news. And of course, I don’t watch TV or listen to radio, etc. so lots of stupid useless news passes me by. And that’s the way I like it.
So today when google update google news to allow customization I thought that was pretty cool. But then I tried it. It’s freaking awesome! No longer is there a sports section with news about cricket and soccer. There are two sections, one for Formula 1 and another for Ice Hockey, the only sports I care about. The Entertainment section is going, going, gone to be replaced by the anime section. The US and World news sections are expanded to reveal those stories that make it just under the radar. And the Sci-Tech and business sections have four new friends: video games, copyright, nintendo and open-source/linux. This is the high quality shite.
What’s even better about it is that it provides me with a URL I can share with the world, so you can see the same news that I see. Think about it. Such a small change to an existing interface has the most amazing effects completely changing the way I read news. I hope that one day I will live in a world where this kind of stuff happens every single day. Oh wait, I do. Here is the URL to read news just like I do.
