This is an idea I’ve had for a while, which I’ve just never gotten around to doing anything about and the Apple’s iPad made me think about it again.
Essentially it’s a new aggregation tool (because I have a love affair with a lot of topical news on one page) but takes the news from a lot of sources. Twitter especially: taking local trending topics and correlating them pragmatically with articles from other places. Reddit, for the comments. BBC for the information. Guardian and a few other online news places for more opinionated pieces. And maybe even finding independent WordPress.com blogs that are talking about the news item.
It wouldn’t be just listing links to various stories, the articles would all be related to each other for that topic.
With a touch screen (which is why the iPad made me think of this again) it would be a simple app that I could just leave running and occasionally click a few things. Without a touch screen it could just be like a news ticker showing snippets from various sources. I’d show a mock up of how I imagine it, but I’m terrible at designing things so it would look horrendous.