I'm a bit of a news junky, and as such, I tend to scan Google News on a regular basis. So as soon as I heard that Google had revamped its news page, I went over to take a look to see if Google had messed too much with my morning habit.
Yes, and no. It's added quite a bit to the page besides its list of current stories -- the right side is now taken up with a short list of recent news, the World Cup stats (which, I assume, will be replaced by whatever the world's top interest is when the World Cup is over), local stories, and what Google calls Spotlight, which seems to be a list of popular stories.
This means that, while the previous version had two columns of categorized stories, the new page has only one. This makes for a busier page and one that is less comfortable to scan for the major stories that I'm interested in seeing.
That being said, there are good things about the new Google News page as well.
For example, it's easier to personalize the page for the types of stories you are interested in (although it wasn't all that difficult before). When you come to the new page, you are immediately pointed toward the "News for you" tool, which lets you rate a number of news categories according to how often you want to read them: Always, Sometimes or Never. (Goodbye, sports coverage!)
However, this isn't really a new feature. What is new is that it is now a lot easier -- via a drop-down menu that is located to the right of each headline -- to send articles to the social networking
services Facebook, Twitter and Buzz, to the Google Reader RSS service, and to your contacts via e-mail.
And, perhaps even more significantly, you can use that same drop-down to decide which sources you want to hear more from. And which sources you want to hear less from.
Although my initial reaction was that it would be great to be able to filter the news to reflect what I'd consider more legitimate sources of news, after a moment or two I started to wonder. There have been many articles written about how stratified our society has become, and how many of us look only to sources that agree with what we want to believe is true. As a result, people are taking more radical positions on either side of each issue and listening less to those on the other side. (You only have to check the comments on any blog dealing with Apple vs. Android devices to see examples of this.)
So if it becomes as easy for me to filter out news sources I don't like as it is for me to filter Andrew Lloyd Webber songs from my Pandora musicals channel, will I start missing out on opinions that I should not ignore?
For now, I'm going to withhold my own opinion on the updated Google News until I've used it for while -- I'm curious as to whether its new social networking functionality will prove useful, and whether I can get used to the rather busy new look.
And I think I'll hold off on the "show more/show less" filters. For now.
Follow-up note: One way to "revert" to the previous version of Google News -- at least, for now -- is to change your news page from the U.S. edition to the Canadian English edition. Thanks to Jennifer Zaino's Semantic Web blog for the tip.
Yes, and no. It's added quite a bit to the page besides its list of current stories -- the right side is now taken up with a short list of recent news, the World Cup stats (which, I assume, will be replaced by whatever the world's top interest is when the World Cup is over), local stories, and what Google calls Spotlight, which seems to be a list of popular stories.
This means that, while the previous version had two columns of categorized stories, the new page has only one. This makes for a busier page and one that is less comfortable to scan for the major stories that I'm interested in seeing.
That being said, there are good things about the new Google News page as well.
For example, it's easier to personalize the page for the types of stories you are interested in (although it wasn't all that difficult before). When you come to the new page, you are immediately pointed toward the "News for you" tool, which lets you rate a number of news categories according to how often you want to read them: Always, Sometimes or Never. (Goodbye, sports coverage!)
However, this isn't really a new feature. What is new is that it is now a lot easier -- via a drop-down menu that is located to the right of each headline -- to send articles to the social networking
services Facebook, Twitter and Buzz, to the Google Reader RSS service, and to your contacts via e-mail.
And, perhaps even more significantly, you can use that same drop-down to decide which sources you want to hear more from. And which sources you want to hear less from.
Although my initial reaction was that it would be great to be able to filter the news to reflect what I'd consider more legitimate sources of news, after a moment or two I started to wonder. There have been many articles written about how stratified our society has become, and how many of us look only to sources that agree with what we want to believe is true. As a result, people are taking more radical positions on either side of each issue and listening less to those on the other side. (You only have to check the comments on any blog dealing with Apple vs. Android devices to see examples of this.)
So if it becomes as easy for me to filter out news sources I don't like as it is for me to filter Andrew Lloyd Webber songs from my Pandora musicals channel, will I start missing out on opinions that I should not ignore?
For now, I'm going to withhold my own opinion on the updated Google News until I've used it for while -- I'm curious as to whether its new social networking functionality will prove useful, and whether I can get used to the rather busy new look.
And I think I'll hold off on the "show more/show less" filters. For now.
Follow-up note: One way to "revert" to the previous version of Google News -- at least, for now -- is to change your news page from the U.S. edition to the Canadian English edition. Thanks to Jennifer Zaino's Semantic Web blog for the tip.
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