Online news was supposed to lead to “The Daily Me”, hyper-personalised publications where the homepage is magically tailored to each user’s interests. But with a handful of notable exceptions – particularly certain mobile sites – few news sites have implemented personalisation features in any significant way.

TheMediaBriefing, the new media news aggregator edited by my friend and former Press Gazette colleague Patrick Smith, is showing everyone else how simple it could be.

The site uses semantic tagging technology to (re-)categorise media news from dozens of sources. Each category created by this tagging process generates generates an index page, like this one for (my new employer) the Financial Times.

With one click, logged-in uses can chose to “follow” those categories that they are interested in. This generates a personalised homepage, called “My Tracker” that merges all the their “followed” categories.

The interface is familiar to anyone who has used Facebook’s Like buttons to add friends and topics to their news feed. It uses the existing category structure of the site, so it’s the sort of thing any news site could implement. It’s a surprise so few news sites do anything similar.

The only other similar feature I’m aware of is on The Sporting News, which allows users to follow individual categories on Facebook using Facebook Like buttons, and has claimed massive success in driving traffic from this. Are there any other examples out there?