Last month's launch of Topix.net was spiced up with the launch of magazine articles available from aggregator KeepMedia, according to the Seattle Times. KeepMedia content appears in matching news categories in a secondary column reserved for important but not-breaking news (here's an example for the category "blogs"). Click on an article and you get an excerpt, click again you can get a free trial or regular access to this and all other single articles for KeepMedia's $49 annual subscription. This is a slick implementation, providing a sorely needed and perfectly targeted context for KeepMedia's almost-current premium magazine content and complementing the Topix portal that promises to grow in sophistication in the months ahead. Topix' claim to fame is deeper categorization and culling of online news sources than its Google, Yahoo or MSN competitors, providing a wide range of newpaper-like pages that highlight breaking news and highly relevant recent content, including locally targeted content. Topix' categorization capabilities (more than 150,000 categories claimed) also allow it to provide references to related categories for individual news stories, as well as automatic references to recently surfed categories, popular categories and people in the news. RSS-based news feeds tuned to specific topic interests are also available. On free-text searches and most category searches Topix is not quite up to "big three" standards for relevance and it tends to glide over news sources that aren't "real sources" but which have excellent content, but in almost all other aspects Topix is one of the most powerful tools for online news aggregation available today. This is another fine example of vContent at work, using leading technology, the best of "good content is where you find it" and excellent usability engineering. Judging by the sparseness of ads its early days on the revenue side for Topix, but worst case this is an excellent implementation that could be scooped up by a nearly-major portal provider in an instant.