Tech Geek

I imagine that many of you, like me, seldom read a printed newspaper. You may read your local paper online or you may get all of your news from Jon Stewart, America's Most Trusted Newscaster. Either way, there is something that I miss from the old newspapers I delivered during my teens. I never did read the paper all that carefully, but I do remember flipping through the pages and scanning the headlines and pictures to see what interested me. Sometimes I'd pause and read an entire article in the middle of the paper.

Google Fast Flip, a Google Labs experiment, recreates some of this experience online. Instead of flipping through one newspaper, you can flip through the web pages, complete with pictures, from a variety of sources.  The service works in all the major web browsers and also has a Mobile version which is optimized for the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android devices. You can click on a headline page to zoom in and click again to go to the original source and read the entire article. It may not sound like much to read my description, but it can be a fun way to catch up on the news of the day.

The page is broken down into 4 sections which you can customize using your Google Account. Some of them are static and others, like Topics, update depending on what or who is in the news. The sections on my page this afternoon are:

• Popular: Recent, Most Viewed, Recommended, Headlines, and My Likes
• Sections: Politics, Business, U.S., World, Sports, Sci/Tech, Entertainment, Health, Opinion, and Travel
• Topics: Hillary Clinton, Meredith Kercher, Toyota, Human Rights, Economy, Knicks, and Susan Boyle
• Sources: PRI, The Atlantic, PC World, Macworld, Technology Review, Smithsonian, and All sources.

Google is pulling information from a wide variety of online content. You can see the list by clicking on All sources. Stop reading this article and go check it out now at http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/.

P.S. - Remember to write Twenty-Ten (2010) on your checks!