Being a bit of a news junky I know all the good spots to find great articles. The main problem that I have found so far with the large news outlets is that you have to take the good with the bad.

By that I mean I don’t like a lot of sports news for example. Being British I don’t really care for news about baseball or American football (I’ll watch the Superbowl if it’s on, but I won’t go hunting the latest news snippets about it). So I would like to completely eliminate that from my news pages if I can.

In one way that’s why RSS was so useful. You could compartmentalise what you wanted to view. Subscribing to just the current affairs or technology sections of news sites is great, and a lot of them have really gone to town with this - BBC, USA Today, CNN, The Times Online, The NY Times, Topix, all have this and more.

Today I signed up for beta testing on a new news service called Persai.

What’s so special about this? I think that this will be very popular for a simple reason - it learns from you rejecting news articles that pop up on it. So if you don’t like news about religion for example, it learns that and you’ll eventually not receive anything similar to that in future.

What’s good about this? Instead of wasting your time wading through tons of news articles and alerts you won’t read anyway, you can now filter them out by focusing only on what you want. Sure, tagging everything through Digg or Del.icio.us does the same thing, so it’s not new in that sense, and in another way it’s just the same as a search engine. But then again, you set up your own feeds to search rather than trolling the entire ‘net for it.

What’s bad about this? Well if you had a radical world view for example, and used that to filter out what you didn’t want to see, new ideas, new thoughts, ideas that contradict your own, you’re only going to reinforce that view. You’d never learn anything new, that could be bad.