As the Garden Grows

I’ve been using a new site to view news lately. You’re going to love the name - It’s called Newgie.com. I’ve been using the site to stay on top of the news that I’m interested in hearing about.

It’s very easy to register on the site and once you are a member (free) you can start selecting news categories that you want to see when you first visit your Newgie page. The site ranks stories based on the interest that other users have shown. Which means that when you log in you have the hottest stories of the day literally right before your very eyes.

Newgie is very easy to use. You can navigate in two major ways. You can go to your My Newgie page and if you’ve already set up your preferences all the stories from the topics and catagories that you selected will be there for you to browse through. Otherwise, you can click on your My account page and set up your preferences there, see the stories that you’ve viewed most recently, and manage your categories, RSS feeds and communities.

It was easy to start selecting categories that I was interested in. You can do all of this from your account page. Just scroll down to the categories section on your account page, then click on “Manage my categories”, from there you can see which ones you’ve subscribed to already or add more categories. Once you’ve selected the types of categories that you like you can adjust the options for each one- such as how many articles it will show you, their rank, and whether it will show you the full article or just a summary to begin with.

You can pick articles that you’ve read and rate them - just hover over the title of the article and description pops up - when you see the pop up you can add the article to your favorites, rate it, recommend it for other Newgies, or discuss it.

Before trying out this news site I used to visit Yahoo News quite often. What is different about Newgie is that when you log on you see the most popular articles of the day in your categories, where as on Yahoo News you get a mix of everything and they’re not always the top stories that you are hoping to find. I think I might like Newgie better than the Yahoo News site.

Newgie also lets you submit your own RRS feed to the site. If it’s approved you can create a Newgie chicklet so that others can add your feed to their newgie acount.