The UN of tech

I was trying to find a decent news aggregator (not RSS, but news), and rediscovered Newsvine. I'm still evaluating the usefulness of it, having added it to my list of Newsgator subscriptions. The main problem I find is that I get inundated with news articles the majority of which I'm not interested in, so I end up skipping the lot for lack of time and interest. What I'd really like is if my newsreader could somehow "learn" which articles I'm interested in by observing the ones I actually click on to read the body of the article and then filter accordingly, or at least highlight them as a best guess.

Anyway that wasn't the original point of my post (it doesn't take much for me to digress). What I wanted to highlight was one of the articles for Seattle that I found "on the vine": Behold the rare lifelong Seattleite. The majority of my friends have observed this phenomenon as well, but then again the majority of my friends are from Microsoft so perhaps there's a connection there :).

Microsoft is like the UN -- I haven't experienced this kind of ethnic diversity in the workplace since I worked for Ericsson, but I think the distinction here is that Ericsson has development centres dispersed around the globe, whereas Microsoft is very Redmond-centric and the effect is much more concentrated. I count among my friends and colleagues the following nationalities or ethnic backgrounds: Australian, Chinese, Pakistani, Indian, Irish, Israeli, Filipino, Canadian, Korean, Thai, Burmese, Singaporean and some others I'm sure I've forgotten for the moment... Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, there are some Americans in there as well :).