Esther Dyson started a blog named Release 4.0.   Welcome to Blogland, Esther!  I am not impressed by amount of intelligence a person has, having plenty of it myself.  What I am impressed by is the shape and movement of intelligence a person has.  Esther's intelligence feels razor-like and moves like a chef, using precision and timing to prepare a good meal.  I was impressed with the way she cooked NetBeans.  In her second post, she talks about Applied Semantic, a recent Google purchase, she provides behind the scene glimpses.  Her blog is now on my daily reading list.

Dave asked for a screenshot, so here they are.  First one shows parts of the front page in browsing mode.  Second one shows parts of the front page in reading mode.  Navigation and tool controls are not visiable in this shot.  I am doing some experiments with 'hand-drawn' controls that stands out without disturbing the 'real newspaper' look and feel.

While visual aspect of the aggregator UI is important, most important thing is how it behaves and 'feels'.  I must say, Daily News is breaking some new ground in UI.

Here are some of the features I am thinking of:

• Clippings - news articles can be 'clipped' into scrapbooks which are searchable.  These clippings can also be reused in other newspapers by drag-and-drop.  Visually, clippings look just like real newspaper clippings.
• Output Formats - native format is XML, but output to RSS, HTML, XHTML, PDF, SWF, SVG, and popular image formats are planned.  Custom output format support via XSLT and XSL-FO.
• Physical Output - manual and scheduled output to printer.
• Two versions - Daily News for news readers and bloggers, Daily News Editor for advanced users.
• Distribution Server/Service - TBD
• Sections - Sections are topic or event specific pages with their own local layout and styles.  Custom modules may be required for specialized sections such as the Wanted and Financial sections.  Sections can be created, edited, and published for and by users.  Section contents can be automatically pulled based on some criterias from specific news sources, or manually added and edited prior to publication by users.
• Reputation - is managed by each instance of the aggregator with possible assistance from reputation provider sites.  Reputation is used for filtering and positioning.

Implementing just these features will be difficult, but it feels good to let some of them out.  What I am striving for is a UI that is as easy to use as a real newspaper and allows people to create, modify, and share personal newspapers.

I'll be in Toronto from Friday to Sunday, so I won't get a chance to respond to comments until Monday.  Have a good weekend everyone.  I'll be dodging SARS virus all weekend.