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The free iPhone app for TechDygest has hit the iTunes app store and could be a good way for you to quickly catch up on technology news on the go. The app is similar to web aggregator Techmeme but with some additional features that really add to the user experience.

For each news story, TechDygest aggregates coverage from multiple news sources, then offers up a paragraph from each source and links out to the originals. You can generally get a good high-level overview of the news items by looking at the headlines and reading the excerpted paragraphs. You can also get a feel for the tone of the various articles covering the story and pick which one to read based on that.

Want to track a hot story being covered by multiple news outlets? Today Google News added the ability to pin hot stories to a special "starred" page where you can go back and find the latest updates at any time. It's a simple but elegant feature that makes the service a lot more interactive and useful.

Stories on the front page can be starred as well as story clusters that appear in search results. The resulting page of starred stories becomes a fully customized news tracker. There are plenty of other features that could be added, but this is a great start.

Dygest.net is a fascinating new service that looks over hundreds of topical sources online, finds out what the hot topics are and publishes excerpts of coverage that help tell the whole story succinctly on one page. It's like Cliffs Notes for meme-tracking and it appears to work quite well.

At first glance Dygest looks like the work of one more computer scientist who's trained a robot to hunt for hot links. There are a lot of those now. This one uses natural language processing algorithms instead of tracking links between sources, though, and the summaries from multiple sources are enjoyable to read. Demo sites have been set up for technology, environmental, film, Chicago-area and San Francisco area news.