I don't pay attention to links on the sides, I don't really care about anything else except for what truly interests me, the rest might as well not exist. I guess it goes without saying that I'm not much into clicking on ads or choosing fancy skins for winamp. I like it Spartan, no extra words and no extra features than those I need.

While visiting a friend I found myself gazing at the page he was currently on when I rang the doorbell. A lot of pictures and the word "NEWS" winked at me and I found it strangely appealing, something more personal and with a friendly interface to complete the feeling. He's got the 22'' LCD monitor so I was able to see that from quite a distance but when I got closer I noticed the multi-colored logo of Google and I was in complete denial instantly. I even told him that he'd been subject to some strange kind of phishing and that he shouldn't click any links there to which he replied with a big glass of "shut the freak up" and showed me the different visualization options available to Google News' homepage.

I watched in disbelief as he rolled through the image version, which he had set as default - the one I saw, the Newsmap which is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator, just check the picture on the left if you want to understand it better. Next came the Google News Cloud which is similar to the tag cloud you see on almost every blog with the difference that while hovering over a keyword will highlight other related keywords. I knew about Google Trends as he had sent me a link to it some other time.

I kind of forgot he had called me over because we had some important game to watch so I came back from the trance that seemed deeply rooted within me just at half time. My team won and I got to rub it in his face but I didn't really feel good about it. After all, he showed me news like I had never seen them before.