Too much news and blogs to follow everyday, not enough time?

If you are like us who are overwhelmed everyday by the flood of information we subscribed to, Radio21g is a simple solution to help you find and read those pieces that really interest you and worth reading among all the information sources you follows regularly.

The basic idea here is to let every user become a news editor in the field they familiar with and to let them create a digested news source from one of their daily news sources. Other users by subscribing to these digested news sources, will be saved from having to go through all the articles (valuable or not) on the original news sources. In the meanwhile, they are accessible to more content that really worth their time on those sources, after those not-so-valuable content have been filtered out.

Yes, everything is free of charge on this website.

Radio21g and Digg.com are both driven by user contributed news and content. But the biggest difference is that Radio21g is based on the belief that each one of us has his/her own set of preferred and trusted news and information sources.

Rather than getting fed from any information sources (the case with Digg), people generally feel more comfortable with getting informed from those sources that they trust and like. At Radio21g, news summaries or web links submitted by a user are put under a certain Channel created by this user, which represents a digested version of an existing news source. For instance, "New York Times Daily Digest" is a user created channel which composes of the latest news digest by the creator from the New York Times website. By doing this, existing readers of New York Times can easily locate what they want to read.

Slashdot combines the activities of user submitting news and editors accepting or rejecting these contributions. At Radio21g, there is no editor behind the curtain. Channel owners are free to add anything to their channels. They are both the contributors and editors, and are responsible for the quality of their own channels.

And also Radio21g allows the contributor to group their news digests into different Channels of their own according to the original source of the digest, while everything submitted into Slashdot goes to the same main page.

On the "Channels" page, you can choose to subscribe to those channels that you are interested. After a Channel is subscribed, it is added to your "My Radio" page, its latest content will be displayed on this page too. "My Radio" page is like your homepage of digested news feed, all latest content from your subscribed channels will be displayed here. You may want to check out this page regularly to get updated with latest news and information, or you may add the RSS feed of this page to your favorite RSS reader and read the latest content from there.

Customization for "My Radio" page are provided to help you re-organize the display of this page according to your preferences.

There may be chances that difference users all created different digest Channels from same news source, i.e. two users both created a digest channel for New York Times. So to help the reader find the channels that suit them, a score is given by the system to each channel. The "Channels" page lists the channels in the order of this score, from high to low. So higher the score, bigger the chance that your channel will be noticed by more people.

The Channel rating is automatically calculated based on several factors, with a max score of 10. These factors include:

• The update frequency of this channel: this takes into account of both how often the channel is updated and how many entries are posted each time averagely.
• How popular a channel is: this is based on the number of subscribers of a channel and how many comments are there totally for all posts in this channel.

Generally, more frequent you post into you channel, higher the score it will get. But if you update frequency is already within one day, then there is not much difference whether you post a new entry every one hour or every 24 hours.

Secondly, you should not post too many new entries each time. It's best to keep the number of new entries somewhere between 3 to 5 a day. While too few new posts will not be able to get the attention of readers, too much content is also contrary to the value of a digested news source.