Today in ReadWriteWeb, Richard MacManus addresses the issue of news overload. He recommends a number of tools to help users manage the flow of news content. The suggestions include Google Alerts, Lazyfeed, PostRank and a few others. All of these products fail two key tests.

1. Does the solution deliver a comprehensive view of the topic to the reader? A comprehensive view includes Tweets, Blog posts, News articles, Photos and Videos.
2. Does the solution effectively improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the reading experience?

At Loud3r we have been tackling this problem for almost three years. Our platform addresses the needs of three important actors. Here’s how we’ve defined their primary goals.

• Publisher – Increase monetization by increasing engagement and improving distribution.
• Curator – Build a brand through selection and commentary of cool and relevant content.
• Reader – Consume a rich and relevant stream of content using my choice of device, time and format.

So what are the tangible things Loud3r does to deliver great curated content to readers via our publishing partners?

Track concepts, not just keywords. The software needs to be able to accurately place Robert Smith of the Cure in a different bucket than Robert Smith, Rep NH. There are a number of methods to accomplish this, but consumers should not be expected to do the grunt work of disambiguation.

Ranking by relevancy. Despite Google’s massive search engine prowess the Alerts product is simply a list of keyword matches. This does not tell the user what’s happening and important for a given topic. The output of the engine has to order the results by relevancy and not just by time. A user needs to be able to glance at the stream and know what’s really important.

Curation tools. Editors and users need to be able to take a list of candidate stories and share, comment and publish the ones that really stand out.

Source quality/relevance. A key component of story relevancy is an awareness of the quality and authority of a source. Google uses Pagerank for search. What’s the equivalent for news where linking behavior is slower than news churn?

Deduplicating. There’s not very much unique content produced every day. I know that seems like heresy, but 90+% of the content is simply sharing, reposting and duplication. A usable content stream hides the exact and near duplicates.

Breadth. News is no longer concentrated. An RSS reader or Twitter lists creates a very narrow view of the world. Loud3r tracks over 300K sources, plus Twitter.