My good friends at Me.dium just released Me.dium Neighborhoods yesterday. This great new feature allows users to see what is HOT in specific interest areas on the Web. I have had a great relationship with the fantastic folks there in Colorado since the release of their award winning social browsing innovation. Me.dium’s latest feature essentially filters the Internet to provide visual –real time recommendations for the most relevant Web pages. The filter really bases these recommendations on Me.dium user activity making it easy to see breaking stories, undiscovered websites and to discover content that Me.dium users find interesting.

In the Neighborhood
Me.dium will initially provide views into nine Neighborhoods using basic areas of interest; News, Music, Pop Culture, Sports, Technology and Gaming. This is actually a brilliant feature and idea on the part CEO Kimball Musk and company. Using Me.dium in this way can be a very quick and potentially viral way to emulate part of the Digg and even StumbleUpon effectiveness - among others. The main difference is, of course, being the added value of web discovery in relation to other people in real time. “What’s Hot” will reveal the most popular topics of the day and a Tenth Neighborhood called –“The Tenth View” will change frequently displaying a random view of recommended sites.

“Me.dium Neighborhoods give users a great way to watch the activity around different content categories anywhere throughout the Web.” said David Mandell, co-founder and vice president of Me.dium. “And once they are completely customizable by specific interest, Me.dium users will be able to keep an eye on any area of the web, see who is already surfing there and interact with them in real-time.”

Conclusion
Me.dium has always been one of my favorite startups – I first reported on them back in February and have essentially followed the rise of one of the best innovations on the Web all along. Neighborhoods seems very promising and besides the heads up display variants site owners can also get widgets too. I like the way the widgets are topically arranged so that the tone of a site can be reflected rather than being more general in nature.

For instance, a sports blog could embed the “sports” widget and etc. Me.dium and its developers have been on top of their game since the start. The IE 7 extension is now standard issue for download on Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace too. If you have not yet tried this great tool you should. Browsing the Web is never quite the same once you see it via Me.dium’s unique perspective.