The free iPhone app for TechDygest has hit the iTunes app store and could be a good way for you to quickly catch up on technology news on the go. The app is similar to web aggregator Techmeme but with some additional features that really add to the user experience.
For each news story, TechDygest aggregates coverage from multiple news sources, then offers up a paragraph from each source and links out to the originals. You can generally get a good high-level overview of the news items by looking at the headlines and reading the excerpted paragraphs. You can also get a feel for the tone of the various articles covering the story and pick which one to read based on that.
How well does it work? If you’re someone who can deal with a little ambiguity and with a little repetition, then it can work quite well. It doesn’t work as well as I wish it did, but it works better than anything else I’ve found so far. It could use some human curation like Techmeme has, but that would require a revenue stream like that site’s healthy advertising. For a robot-only shop, Dygest seems to me to be doing a good job.
Give it a try for yourself and let us know if it feels like something you’d come back to regularly for a quick news catch-up. I like it.
