MSNBC.com's Spectra Visual Newsreader provides an interesting way of visually presenting channels of content from the massive news site. Adding channels drops media cards into the screen and rotates them in a 3D carousel.

Below the vortext of cards, a hybrid pagination scrollbar, which bests Apple's concept, allows the user to select cards to view one at a time. Previous/Next arrows allow linear progression. A helpful [current card]/[total cards] indicator is shown on the scroll bar. The currently selected card is shown below the carousel with media details and thumbnail. What really makes this control nail the experience is that after each card in the order is displayed, every prior card is tucked away into the stack. This hiding behavior is based on the linear order cards rather than hiding the ones the user has actually viewed. If they were eventually able to use the latter, the "read/viewed" status, as the criteria would make this that more interesting.

1. Full view of the Spectra Visual Newsreader.
2. Clicking on a card in the carousel displays details and the pagination controls update to show the number of the card in the stack.
3. Carousel showing prev/next, first/last, and scroll bar.
4. Selecting cards hide all prior items behind the current card deck/stack and show the remaining items in the carousel.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/components/spectra/spectra.html