A Google Labs experiment called Fast Flip which is accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com represents a move by Google to provide a news magazine like experience. This allows a reader to literally flip thru the news articles in a given category.

This allows you to quickly glance at a number of publications sequentially and to pick out content that interests you.

There is also a personalization element where Fast Flip will try to present content for you based on your previous selections. Fast Flip will try to guess your preferred content by topics, news sources as well as writers that you show a preference for.

Show Me The Money

Naturally for Google to do this kind of product there has to be some context based Ad revenue somewhere in the mix!

What happens is the Google partners with the publishers of the news feeds, in order to publish their content to the Fast Flip stream. In return the publishers receive a portion of the context based ads that get shown alongside the content. Publishers that are part of the experiment include New York Times, Washington Post and Newsweek.

Google theory holds that the more news pages a reader is exposed to, the more they will read. This will expose content to more readers and thus increase the number of ads that get shown.

Have a good look and see what you think.