I have been a loyal user of MyNewsTeam’s web application for exactly 4 years today, and I know that because when I looked at my newspaper this morning it showed Volume 4, Issue 1 on the front page. As usual I just had to disconnect it from the USB port and it was waiting for me to take and read on the train.

Surprisingly, it hasn’t changed very much from the first time I used it. It gathers news and information from around the world based on my location and preferences, and organizes it into a newspaper format of 8 sheets of e-ink, with text, images and data laid out in a logical sequence. It manages to prioritize stories and news items as part of the service, and knows that family news should be dominant on the front page, but without squeezing out world headlines. The local news content is served by our village newspaper, along with the local High School and other interest groups. Blog scrapers deliver a great deal of the technology news.
 

I have fine tuned it a little recently to direct it to new RSS feeds, especially my family feed that provides three or four news stories each day. I’ve also created a playlist of world and personal video that is reviewed on the newspaper and available on my TV or any other device for $2 whenever I want to access it.
 

I can also look up back issues, email web versions of the newspaper to friends and relatives, clip out stories for saving locally and have a version created for podcast download. But the greatest thing about MyNewsTeam is sitting in Starbucks, plugging the newspaper into my cellphone and watching it change in real-time. As new stories come in and gain prominence over existing news, the animation shows them exchanging places, settling in, shuffling around before the banner changes from amber to green to signify that all is well and a new edition has hit the airwaves. In the 4 years I have never had to change the e-ink pages, they still work remarkably well.

 
But the strangest thing has to be that I registered the URL www.mynewsteam.com way back in about 1997 and allowed it to lapse two years later due to a lack of automated news gathering at the time. It seems that today it is still waiting to be claimed.