I want to allow people to act as editors, selecting and ranking/positioning stories and pictures, edit and mark stories to correct mistakes or classified them with keywords.  Intelligent selection of images is especially important.  Ultimately, I want to allow human editors to form some sort of collaboration network with workflow infrastructure.  I am still trying to figure out how to achieve these goals while supporting both amateur and professional editors.

Professionally, I can see companies publishing newspaper sections dedicated to their industry sector.  Large companies will have enough news to publish weekly or even daily newspaper sections for their customers.  There will also be a large number of industry experts who would like to publish newsletters to be automatically inserted into people's newspapers on weekly or monthly basis.  Schools and governments have their own particular needs as well.

This area is where I need the most help with.  If you have ideas, suggestions, or comments on this area, I would appreciate it. 

Permanence is an important part of the newspaper UI.  By permanence, I mean like the pile of real world newspapers that gathers around our houses over a week until the garbage day comes around.  Memories of what I read or scanned within last seven days are fresh in my mind and there is certain comfort in knowing that I can get at it and read it in same context.

In contrast, other aggregator UIs lets news articles flow by or gather out of context.  Real world newspapers have a certain hard-to-describe orientating effect on its readers and I feel that its important to duplicate that effect in newspaper UI.  If you know of some HCI reseach done in this area, I would appreciate knowing about them.

As Hugh points out, navigation is critical for effective newspaper UI.  I am still working on this, but what I currently have is a 'flat' paper with two modes: Scanning and Reading.  In Scanning mode, view is zoomed out to a point where headlines can easily be scanned.  In Reading mode, view is zoomed in to allow articles to be easily read.  Transition between the mode is a single mouse click.  So you click to read the article under the mouse and then click to get back to scan.  Mouse drag is used to scroll in both modes.

Page navigation is done by visual artifacts along the edges as well as a 'flick' (fast horizontal drag) in Scanning mode.  I am still exploring other ways to navigate but I have yet to find an easier mechanism.  The magic sauce in this UI is the 'instant' transition between modes, meaning less than .5 seconds of delay.  Effects of such 'instant' transition has first been seen in Atari's Adventure game twenty years ago, but still remains true today.

A Side Note: To maintain the emotional effect of real newspaper, the newspaper UI does not support inline scrollable areas.  You can scroll (actually you are moving the paper) the newspaper but you can not scroll its parts.

Others have already discussed the importance of chunking and scanning issues for news aggregator UI.  What hasn't been discussed is how news chunking can be applied over time.  While there is an over abundance of news everyday, enough to flood anyone's schedule, but this is not the case for many specialized topics.  In the real world, this problem is dealt with special inserts in daily newspapers and weekly, monthly editions.  Same mechanism can be applied for news aggregators.

When a user creates a special section, user has the option of selecting frequency.  For example, I am not interested in baseball, but I try to follow news about Korean baseball players in MLB.  So I create "Korean MLB News" newspaper section with names of the players as filters, point it to sports news feeds, and schedule it to be inserted into Sunday Morning editions of my newspaper.  This way, I get a full page of news instead of one or two articles each day.  I also like to read about PGP related news, so I create one and schedule it for delivery on 15th of each Month.

By chunking news over time, I gain the ability to look at the big picture at the cost of delay in receiving the news.  For many news topics, this is a very appealing feature IMHO.

I am forty-one today.  How am I coping with being forty-something?  Well, I am learning to find joy in small things like walking with my wife and son around the wildness areas near my house.  At first, we biked around but I found that scenery just moved too fast and there was no time to talk.  Being flat-footed, I tend to avoid walking far, but the area around my house is great and filled with wildlife so I can stop frequently and watch the animals.  The other day, I saw a swan eat a duckling.  Kind of shocking, but there were six other ducklings to keep the mother duck busy.  So, this is how I am being forty-something.

Today is my 41st birthday.  I am still coping with being forty-something.  Weird thing is that now I am more interested in health and drugs, you know, like Viagra and Ginko.  Most of all, I want to zap the inside of my nose with laser to minimize allergy induced nasal problems.  At this age, I need all the oxygen I can get to my brain.  So I am thinking of Viagra, Ginko, and Laser, and Nose on my 41st birthday.  I am looking forward to something else on my 42nd.

I just spent an hour reading Donal E. Knuth's book "TeX: The Program" to refresh my memory on typesetting algorithms I'll be using in Daily News.  TeX was written in self-documenting language called WEB.  Frankly, literate programming is just too verbose for my taste.  Its like a long novel chopped up into small pieces.  A few diagrams would have been very helpful.

My experiements with Flash to create highly responsive UI didn't happen because Flash MX's UI kept getting in my way and I quit out of frustration.  Bad UIs drives me nuts like the way aggressive drivers upset people on freeways.  Only part of Flash MX I like is the Scene Editor.  Everything else is a good example of how NOT to design an IDE.  There are two many windows and docking is horrible.  ActionScript editor is slow and tedious to use.  Net effect is spagetti code with a confusing mix of meatballs (images and components).

Macromedia Flash MX is great for building good looking custom UI, but most of them simply sucks when it comes to interactivity.  Using Flash-based UI feels like you are doing it underwater and behind an inch thick glass.  Controls feel sluggish, oily, and unreal like they are not really there.  I suspect this is due to problems with how Flash manage events and threads.  There might be ways to make the components more responsive using ActionScript, but its not apparent.  I am gonna experiement for a few more hours before the night is over.