Hey, You Got Your Google News in My Yahoo!

Google News has added RSS (and Atom) feeds to Google News, letting you snare headlines--from both its overview page and subsections such as Sci/Tech and Entertainment--using your RSS reader of choice.

For me, that's the plebian but extremely handy My Yahoo. Adding a dollop of Google News to Yahoo results in a news site that's more rich and useful than either is on its own--and I only need to check one site, not two.

You usually think of an RSS feed as linking back to one particular site (here are PC World's own RSS feeds, by the way), but in the case of Google News's feeds, it's just aggregating stuff of interest--each link goes straight to the originating news source. The Google News filter is silently selecting stories it believes to be of interest, and while it's not perfect (it often takes awhile to notice that a major story is a major story), it's an addictive way to stay informed.

Google News via RSS isn't a complete replacement for Google News the old fashioned way. One of the niftiest things about the Google News site itself is the way it clusters related stories from a bizarre array of sources. (It's not often you can easily see what both the San Luis Obispo Tribune and The Scotsman have to say about a news event--yet both are in Google's block of stories today on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.)

Google News RSS, on the other hand, only gives you the lead item from each cluster...but it's still pretty terrific. And it's just another example of a big and exciting trend on the Web: How RSS and other technologies are letting us remix Web content with a few clicks to get highly personalized streams of content. (Here's another example.)