We’re admitted and proud life-long New Yorkers.  Famous in New York, and amusingly made fun of at times is NY1’s Pat Kiernan‘s In the Paper. New York 1(NY1) is a New York City all-news station.

Pat takes reading the paper, a difficult and time-consuming task, and summarizes it into a short few minutes of narration. You can check today’s out, or previous archived days by clicking here. Pat recently branched out with Pat’s Papers, taking his piece out on the web. To quote the site:

“Pat’s Papers is a carefully edited collection of US news headlines delivered each weekday morning. We cut through the clutter of the news choices on the Web to deliver a summary of stories that span the entire news spectrum – from international news to domestic politics to science to gossip.”

Why do we bring up Pat’s Papers? In recent Gadget Wisdom posts, we’ve discussed streaming media. And news video of various sorts is the easiest to find online. The problem is that we want a full program, to mirror our television watching habits, not a series of shorter clips and pieces.

How do we, like Pat, take the massive selection of new media that appears each day on the internet and organize it into handy bite-sized morsels so we can digest it?

That is the question we have been contemplating. To take a page from music players, we need a playlist. we need to compile a list of sources we want to access each day. A internet development most of us are familiar with now helps with this…the RSS feed.

RSS is really designed for reading material, ie blog posts, but many sites use it to push the URL to videos as they are added to the site, or post pages with embedded video, a very useful application of the technology.

We have yet to find a website or software application that combines these publicly available feeds to form a video watching roundup, in the vein of headline news, playing the relevant streams one after another. We plan to continue our research and see what we come up with. the information is there, and we continue to explore how to bring it all together in a navigable way.

But what do you think? Would such a service be useful? What do you use to fill this need? Do we really need anything more complicated than an RSS reader and a few choice sites?

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