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New Google News Page

1 Jul 2010 by Graham Lyons - News , , No Comments


In the news today: People in Finland, as from today have the legal right to broadband, meaning it is the Governments responsibility to make sure every Finnish citizen is connected to at least a 1Mbps internet connection. Also in the news: Sony are having to announce a mass ‘recall’ of F and C series laptops thanks to a major over heating problem. Luckily for them this can be fixed using a software patch so a complete recall may be avoidable. In mobile news, data roaming charges in the EU have new rules protecting users from inadvertently running up huge bills. Now operators must inform customers of the charges when they enter a different EU country and can be cut off when they reach a pre determined limit.

What do all these news stories have in common? I found them on the new revamped Google News page!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JqSJIIN2sE&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

It was fully launched yesterday in English in the U.S. only, and is due to be fully launched elsewhere in the world over the next couple of months. So far in the UK it is only possible to change a few settings, like adding new sections.

Personal

Google explains that the Google News is going to be more personal. It will allow you to personalise what news you want to see, of what you want to see most and of what you want to see less. It also gives you the option to select which news outlets you want to see more from, so if you want to hear more from ‘Puppy Trainer Weekly’ and less from ‘Pythagoras Quizzical’ then there is a section for you. There will be a trending topic style list of most read stories below your main topic list, just in case you don’t know which news story you want to read and fancy seeing what everyone else is interested in.

I particularly like the list of keyboard shortcuts the Help section offers. I do like a good shortcut:

  • j/n = next story
  • k/p = previous story
  • / = search
  • ? = open help
  • s = star a story
  • . or f = open the Sharing and Source Preferences drop-down menu
  • Enter = open the headline article for the current story

Sharing

There is plenty more scope for sharing as every news morsel has a drop down menu, from which you can select exactly how you want to tell everyone about how the new iCar is going to run on dog urine. I would Buzz that cracker.  You can also hover over a single story in the ‘News for you’ section and up pops a list of other news sources for the same story. Great for research.

Thanks Google!

While this is all very nice, it begs the question: Is this just ‘Stage 6.5’ of an inevitable multitude of steps towards pay-per-article news or a news subscription service? Could Google just slap a one off payment for all of its many services? There aren’t really many other companies which could actively counteract the decline in news paper circulation more vigorously that Google.



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