The latest news directory on the block is Newgie, which offers both aggregated news and an RSS feed directory. It’s available in beta at http://www.newgie.com.

The front page looks very spartan, with no summaries, no sources, no story times, just headlines divided into categories. Mouseover the headlines, however, and you’ll get popup windows with summaries from the news stories (it looks like Newgie indexes only news stories with RSS feeds, so pretty much everything has a summary/the first 20 words/whatever.) Full stories open in new browser windows; for each story you can add a comment, or if you have an account you can add it to your Favorites or Recommend It.

Newgie’s particular brand of ranking is called “IntelliRank”. Newgie takes user actions into account when ranking articles, along with other aspects like age of article, etc. (You can get a explanation of IntelliRank at http://www.newgie.com/content.asp?pageid=63 .)

In addition to the front page, there are a large number of categories and subcategories available; you can get a complete overview at the category page. The RSS feed directory is available at http://www.newgie.com/rssfeeddirectory/; it’s divided up the same way that the category pages are and show what feeds power which categories. That’s pretty smart. Unfortunately less than 2000 feeds are currently indexed, so this directory’s going to have to grow a lot.

Newgie has done a lot to integrate community functions of discussion and recommendation right from the start, and I like how the feed directory parallels the news categories. But I wonder if maybe a little bit too much information is being left to the mouseover popups. Perhaps at least the source could be included on the front page? A would like a little more data to filter what I’m looking at; I would rather not have to mouseover EVERYTHING.