Library clips

Inform is a very sophisticated News Portal that focuses on discovery of related content…you can also personalise the news to your perspective, and view the latest from within your own inbuilt RSS reader or grab the feed to read in your own personal RSS reader.

Front page

Front page lists top stories by category, click to see a full page for each category, or you can choose a category on the category bar, these also have sub-categories.

Channel Directory

There is a tab to see a directory for all categories called Top Channels, the difference is that when you choose from this list it launches a 2 boxes: Related Content, and a Discovery Path.

Here you can see Related Content to a topic you have chosen, and sort it by relevance, and limit it to news, blogs, audio, video…clicking on an article will open it in the other box.

Discovery Path

In the Discovery Path it lists all the subjects from the stories that appear in the related content, these are grouped into 6 headings: Topics, Peoples, Industries, Places, Products, Organisations.
You can add a subject to your discovery path to narrow your browsing, or start a new Discovery Path with one click.

Since there is no back browser button, they have supplied a Discovery History (very handy).

There is also a feed for the page you are on, also offering a re-syndication widget for your blog sidebar.

My Channels

Lastly you can create your own Channel, type in a search word, it will suggest subjects that are close to this keyword, choose as many as you want, keep doing searches to add more suggested subjects…so this is the ability to mesh multiple subjects into the one channel…also generates a spliced subject feed (basically a feed for the channel you have created).

This isn’t a search feed, it is just viewing results by suggested subjects by the system…so the only convenience besides meshing subjects, is that you just go to your My Channels area and view your channels instead of looking for the subject term/s in the directory everytime…again you can sort by relevance or news source (news, blogs, video, audio), and now also by date…it’s a personal feed reader.

Related Articles and Flagging Articles

Each article can be flagged which lives in the flagged area (see the tab), and each story has a link to related stories, or an icon that does the same thing, clicking on this opens up a sidebar with excerpts of all the related stories…this is similar to related content for a topic, only this is at the article level.

Again you will see subjects from related stories to the one you are viewing, and when you click on an article it opens in the adjacent box where the subjects were listed (the subjects have now moved to a bar above the article)

Top Sources

Add a source to your area, this is like a personal feed reader (sort by date, flag stories)…you can also launch a discovery path from here.

So there seems to be 2 sorts of personal feed readers, one for Subjects, one for Sources.