Customizable News!

When I pick up a newspaper, I usually end up setting aside a lot of it, often sections at a time, that simply don’t have stories that interest me on their front pages. It’s not that these stories are bad - it’s simply that they don’t interest me. Of course I like knowing what’s important in the world, and for the most part The Washington Post does a good job of informing me of this. However, beyond the must-read stories for everyone, the post is a mixed bag in terms of keeping me interested.

But what if the newspaper delivered to your house were customized to your personality? Of course, you would still get stories that were very important in terms of world events, but the “other stuff” would be stories customized to what you want to hear about. Unfortunately that’s not very cost effective for newspapers, but it IS very possible on the internet. You can create your very own personalized newspaper that delivers headlines to you from tons of different news sources (Washington Post, New York Times, and even blogs if you want) based on the articles you like to read. Customizable News Sites are going to be all the rage pretty soon. In this article I will review two: Findory (http://www.findory.com) and Spotback (http://www.spotback.com).

Findory is my personal favorite. When you go to the main page, you’ll notice that everything looks pretty plain. The site is very clean. The way the customization works is that you click on various articles on the site and it builds a database of the articles you tend to read, and articles that others tend to read. Over time, it matches up similar articles that come out based on your previous preferences. I think it does a pretty good job. For me I get plenty of articles about hybrid cars, global warming, and Washington sports teams, three things that I really like to read about. There are also plenty of “important” news articles that appear about world events.

My favorite part about Findory is that I can set up RSS feeds for my customized news - and even for different categories of news such as sports, business, and the ever-so-important entertainment news (just kidding, I couldn’t name you ten popular actors if you held a gun to my head). The only thing I don’t like about it is that you can’t customize the layout at all, however, since I read just about all of my articles after getting the links from RSS feeds, I don’t mind so much.

Spotback is another alternative. It seems like a pretty promising service, although it did just release out of private beta less than 24 hours ago from the time I started writing this article. The one thing I like about Spotback a lot is that it seems very customizable. It looks like you can change around the layout any way you’d like. Also, it gives you the ability to rate feeds on a -5 to +5 scale, using 0.1 increments. This is cool, in that it is precise, but not cool in that who knows the difference between a news story you thought was a 4.4 and a 4.6? I also don’t like the fact that Spotback’s front page seems to be pretty heavy on blogs rather than more “official” news sources, which kind of steers me away from it. Regardless, I still submitted gimme-five for inclusion.

I’m certain that there will be plenty more of these customizable news sites in the future. Maybe eventually our newspapers will come custom delivered to our doors, but until then, we have some options on the internet that make keeping up with the news a lot more fun than before.