Relevancer

News aggregators like Google News ended the monopoly media outlets once had over their own content. Users can quickly scan headlines from hundreds of news sources without ever actually visiting the website, all while Google profits from advertisements displayed next to headlines. “With the rise of search engines and news aggregators on the internet, newspapers lost an important part of that chain of value. I think that this move to step out of a search service is an attempt to regain dominance here,” said Eugenio Bucci, a professor at the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP).

Jagannathan says the company’s plan is to offer this same solution to businesses, allowing them to create their own curated magazine for their customers, employees, partners, etc. In that product, NewzSocial will offer a private business network, private channels, automated tweets and curated content integrated into their website.

The study, “Content Marketing: Ready for Prime Time,” found 34% of marketers are “very” or “fully” engaged with content marketing this year, up from 18% last year. In addition, 66% of marketers project they will be “very” or “fully” committed to content marketing in 2013, according to the study, which was based on an online survey of 440 b2b marketing professionals conducted in April and May.

At the same time, Nuzzel does allow you go beyond your immediate social graph, with a “stories you may have missed” section, which shows headlines shared by friends of friends, or by the people followed by the people you follow. And you can browse other users’ Nuzzel streams, which can help you follow different interests

One of the curious factors in the new wave of publishing services is that they are restrictive in nature. In all four of the services we mentioned - Medium, Branch, Svtle and App.net - you cannot write to them unless you have been given permission to do so. Essentially, they're read-only by default. In other words, this new crop of services is less democratic than what came before - Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger and even Twitter.

Now that content curation has become mainstream and so many businesses are focused on contextualizing your actions, it’s their turn to flourish. Once the basis of human intent has been founded, you can pretty well guess what an individual’s next action will be. This drums up dreams of better advertising, properly targeted marketing, improved product recommendations and personalized data streams, all given back to the consumer. It’s an entire service built around a data model that understands you better than you understand yourself. “If we gaze a bit further down the road, it’s reasonable to expect that content curators will employ the use of personalized and artificial intelligence technologies. Whether its a site with 20 million uniques, or one with 10 thousand, these tools will have the ability to learn and make assumptions about readers across publishers’ properties, and across the internet landscape, says Jarret Myer, CEO and Founder of UPROXX . “These tools will have the ability to learn and make assumptions about groups of users, with the intent to serve the most desired content based on crowd sentiment. It’s also possible to expect there won’t be a need for editors to curate and upload content to initiate conversation; personalization technologies will automate the process of curation by identifying topics of interest and uploading them in real-time.”

“Flipboard is essentially an RSS feed,” Trapit co-founder and Chief Product Officer Hank Nothhaft told me. “It’s not bringing anything new to the table. It’s not highly personalized or relevant. We’ve taken the opposite approach. We’re all about user-generated interest, being selfish and really reveling in the things that you like.” Trapit scours content from about 120,000 sources, up from 100,000 last year. In the past few months, the company also cut about 10,000 sources based on user feedback.

Me? I'm immersed in Google services, but I worry that handy new features will arrive in a steady stream of minor changes that are all but imperceptible until one day I wake up and realize that Google has access to everything that makes me who I am. ... Advertising has been good to Google. But as the company becomes more than a search engine, it's got a choice to make about its revenues in the future: should it emphasize selling services rather than selling advertising?

The companies that are truly winning over audiences and driving consumers are the ones that are experimenting with a balance of automated aggregation and human-directed curation. It's a process of out-sourcing and in-sourcing.

In addition to the algorithmic measures, Google is taking the smoke and mirrors out of search by more openly communicating algorithm changes to SEOs and the general public. Why? In some cases, black-hat tactics were inadvertent, caused by website administrators using outdated techniques or misinterpreting Google’s algorithmic intent. Furthermore, a good deal of high-quality content gets lost in the search shuffle because creators simply ignore SEO. More than ever, Google wants every website to be optimized and optimized properly. The more high-caliber content Google can serve up to users in SERPs, the more business it will do. The trend: Google will push hard in this direction, devising more accurate methods of evaluating the relevance, substance and trustworthiness of content. It will get better at interpreting both the inherent quality of the work itself and the social-sharing data associated with it.

Again we can see that Google seems unconvinced on where these signals value lies. If they're unsure of the value for their own metrics (+1), one has to wonder how comfortable they are with 3rd part signals such as Facebook, Twitter or other social services.

Prismatic is built around a complex system that provides large scale, real-time, dynamic personalized re-ranking of information, as well classifying and grouping topics into an ontology. Prismatic has recently announced new improvements, as well, so expect the team to continue to push the limits for news consumption. This discussion would be of interest to any online or social news junkies (like me) and/or developers who are fiddling with ideas of how to build on top of Twitter.