Instead of aggregating headlines and summaries with links to many sites, Daily Me licenses content from news sources.

"We create an experience in one, unified view," Budde said.

To set up a personalized home page on Daily Me a user creates a profile and login information. After confirming registration, a user gets a menu of choices of the type of news they're interested in. Categories include World and U.S. news; elections; money; technology; sports, science; health; entertainment; and lifestyle. Each topic includes several subcategories, and users select only what they want.

In addition to accessing Daily Me news via the personalized home page, users can also choose to have stories delivered via e-mail or sent directly to their printer at specified times. A program to enable automatic printing must be installed to enable this function. A text-only e-mail option is available for delivery to mobile phones.

Budde said Daily Me offers three distinct services: editorial decisions, personalization and socialization. Daily Me editors choose stories that best fit each category, users select their news topics and socialization tools make it easier to connect with people with similar interests.

This third area is the "Daily We" portion of the service. Users may specify hobbies and interests in their profile and allow others to see this information. Users may also score their interest in a story with the "meme" feature.

Instead of recommending a story, a reader may mark it with one of six categories. These are: "enlightening, humorous, insightful, uplifting, tragic and weird."

"How do you give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a story that is about a tragedy, or people in a hurricane?" Budde said. "The concept of allowing people to categorize stories into broad-based categories is something we've been working on for six months. We are letting our community build that (feature) for us."

Daily Me is free; revenue comes from several advertising networks. Budde said there is no sales force yet, but one is being considered.

"A lot of our efforts are trying to figure out which ad networks will do the best job in selling parts of our network," Budde said.

I invite you to try Daily Me and let me know your thoughts. Send comments, including your current Web news habits, with the subject "Daily Me" and I'll share them in a future column.

Share your Internet story with me at agibes@reviewjournal.com.