Imagine a TV Mosaic or Channel Mix or Multi Screen and you have the user interface of Newser. Nowadays a search engine either has to beat Google or be specialized.

The best is if it not only works but has a unique user interface which is highly usable for the task it was designed for. Newser’s specialty is news and it’s unique user interface set’s it apart from other news sites. In addition there is a team of editors which reads the top 100 news sites and select the “best” news for you. It is kind of a Readers Digest of the web news (in this case I say that as a positive point).

The front page has three top stories and a menu which allows you to select or filter news by topics.

ARTS AND LIVING
OPINION
BUSINESS
POLITICS
CRIME AND COURTS
SCIENCE AND HEALTH
GLOSSIES
SPORTS
GOSSIP
TECH
MEDIA
US
MUST READS
WORLD

Another set of filters shows you the most popular topics in the last 48 hours:

But there is more! You can also one click filters for local news like London, United Kingdom or other locations (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Washington, …) unfortunately they are are mainly cities in the USA, Canada and a few in the UK so this would need improvement if I want my local news from Novosibirsk (just kidding). Besides the local news they throw in the local weather as well.

If these filters are not enough for you you can change the appearance of the site.

Naturally they have a community (let’s call them the my things) and offer their selected, enriched and filtered news as RSS feed, as Twitter account or on your mobile device (only iPhone – not good as I am an Android guy). Before I forget this: they are also on Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Eons, MySpace, Plurk and Cafe Mum (all weapons of a Web 2.0 marketing strategy are used – give them a hand for this – I wonder if this works).

If you set an update time of e.g. 5 minutes, a 4 x 5 grid for the news, tune it to your favorite news topic, go full screen and put that on your second monitor you can be entertained and informed the whole day – instead of background music you would have background news. If you are an ADD type of person the update frequency will not be your thing (remember humans are reading, summarizing and filtering) and as humans are involved you have to trust them that their view of the news is independent, unbiased and fair.

Try it! Let us know what you think. CLICK HERE.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 3:16 pm and is filed under News Search, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.