Co-founders Gary Griffiths and Hank Nothhaft are quick to rebut each of those comparisons by pointing to Trapit’s underlying technology as the differentiator.

Users input keywords or entire URLs and create “traps,” which are content modules drawing upon approximately 100,000 “high quality” content sites. Thus the corpus being tapped is a tiny sliver of the web; however Trapit’s co-founders believe that the sites they’ve identified offer a much better experience than a large index of open web content.

For example, Trapit won’t use content from “aggregator” sites (e.g., Yahoo News) or content farms. The company uses a combination of machines and humans to identify high-quality sources. Trapit then uses “semantic extraction” to identify pieces relevant to your query or URL. Over time Trapit becomes more personalized, based on explicit user ratings (thumbs up or down, like Pandora) and other signals.

In earlier interviews, Trapit’s co-founders were explicitly invoking Pandora to describe the nature of the service. With me on the phone earlier today they used a number of analogies and metaphors that indicate they’re struggling a bit to convey what’s useful and what’s different about Trapit. They said they were seeking to walk a kind of tightrope between search and social discovery and get that balance right.

Trapit has been around for about a year in private beta with 10,000 users. Data provided by Trapit showed impressive engagement metrics among these early private beta users:

• 100,000 traps (content modules) created
• 31% active users
• 24 minute average stay (vs. Facebook’s 22:53 or New York Times’ 7:13)
• 17 page views per visit (vs. 21 for Facebook)

Trapit will release iOS and Android apps, including for tablets in Q1 2012. That’s when the Flipboad and Zite comparisons will really kick in. Again the co-founders assert that their technology makes Trapit more personalized and sophisticated than more basic “social news readers” or aggregators on tablets.

Yet without the benefit of having spoken to Trapit’s co-founders as I did, you wouldn’t necessarily put it in a separate category from the crop of tablet-oriented news readers to come out in the past year: Flipboard, Pulse, Taptu, Zite, AOL Editions and Yahoo Livestand.

Another way of describing what Trapit is doing is “persistent search.” But you wouldn’t use Trapit instead of a search engine. You’d use it as a news reader. Trapit may also expand into other areas beyond news, such as shopping or deals for example. There’s nothing about the underlying capabilities that are wedded to news content.

Set up of personalized “traps” — Trapit will also recommend traps — is not as intuitive as it might be. On balance, however, the user experience was promising.

One reason Siri is engaging is because it puts a voice interface on top of its sophisticated technology. That creates greater usability than in the absence of voice. And while Trapit may have the same intelligence under the hood, the exterior isn’t quite as sexy.

The report focuses primarily on news consumption on tablets. However we know from numerous other studies that tablet owners are also highly engaged shoppers as well.

Tablet owners are more educated, affluent and employed than the general US population. And they’re using tablets to access news instead of their PCs, TVs and print (to a lesser degree). Pew says that people are with their tablets roughly 95 minutes daily. Separate studies have found that tablet usage spikes in the evening and on weekends.

The study surveyed 1,159 tablet users by telephone in the summer and early fall of this year.

Here are some additional findings:

• For 90 percent of tablet news consumers (the 53 percent) it is the preferred news-reading medium, replacing the PC, TV and print. The PC is the primary “loser” in the substitution of tablets for other media
• 30 percent spend more time consuming news than before their tablets
• Only 14 percent have paid for news content specifically on tablets, while a second group (23 percent) have combined print-digital subscriptions. Accordingly paying subscribers for access to news on tablets “may be closer to a third” of tablet owners
• Browser vs. apps: 40 percent get news principally through a browser; 31 percent use both browser and apps; 21 percent get news mainly through apps
• While news-app consumers are the minority (21 percent), they’re more engaged and more satisfied than browser-news consumers. They are also”power users” who consume more news content than others

There’s a good deal more to explore in the full report, and there’s also an infographic with a summary of stats: Infographic: The Tablet Revolution.

This search-to-content discovery pivot has been made before by Worio, which became Zite, and Taptu, which also became went from being a mobile search provider to a personalized newsreader.

Now comes Evri, which already was a “content discovery engine,” with a bunch of mobile apps. But now the company is releasing an iPad app that from the outside appears very much like Flipboard, Zite, Pulse, Taptu or AOL Editions. However the company says that its semantic search technology is different. Evri originally launched in 2008 as a “semantic search” engine or search alternative.

Evri claims that what differentiates it is its “topic-based” approach and that users can dynamically create and follow news about any issue or topic, dynamically generated from a  search query or keyword. Like other newsreaders Evri will capture content coming from social feeds (i.e., Twitter and Facebook). But it also indexes roughly “2.3 million topics from over 15K of the Web’s best sources.”

This is a very crowded segment, with more companies (including Yahoo) likely to join the personalized iPad app news fray. The success or failure of these apps will be based not just on what’s under the hood but the quality and aesthetics of the overall experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related Entries

• Former Mobile Search Engine Taptu Reinvents Itself As Tablet Platform Tool
• Search Technology Behind iPad Magazine “Zite”
• Walmart Buys Former Search Engine Kosmix To Power Social And Mobile Shopping
• LinkedIn Lauches a Social News Site
• Kosmix Launches MeeHive Personalized News

Originally Taptu was a search engine for feature phones and low-end smartphones. It then morphed into a search engine for the “touch friendly” mobile web, indexing only sites that looked good touch-screen smartphones. But as smartphone apps proliferated and gained traction, and as Google came to dominate browser-based mobile search, the company took its search technology and, like Worio, put it behind a “social news reader” for smartphones and tablets (with increasing emphasis on tablets).

The company initially built branded iOS and Android apps for handsets and later tablets that featured content aggregation and personalization. However the “social news” segment for tablets is getting increasingly crowded with Flipboard, AOL Editions, Yahoo Livestand (not yet launched), Pulse, News.me and Zite. Accordingly Taptu is shifting again and now offering APIs to third party publishers and developers to enable them to aggregate content and create their own social news sites and apps.

Taptu also announced a small new round of financing ($3.5 million) last week. It’s preparing to announce a partnership with a significant publisher that will be the first client of the new platform. I spoke last week with CEO Mitch Lazar who previously ran Yahoo’s mobile business in Europe.

He was unable to reveal the identity of the publisher but was upbeat about Taptu’s opportunity and prospects for the new approach. When I asked him about competitive software tools that create tablet apps from existing web or print content Lazar argued that Taptu’s search technology and capabilities give it an edge and are more powerful than competitive tablet “conversion” tools.

This may well be a path to success and ultimately an acquisition for Taptu. The company said that it will continue to maintain its own branded apps. However for those apps to succeed and continue to gain adoption, the cluttered UI will need to be cleaned up and streamlined. This was one of the reasons that Zite was picked up by CNN: it had compelling technology under the hood but the company also created a polished and intuitive user experience.

Kosmix, recently acquired by Wal-Mart, is yet another example of a search engine turned content aggregator, compelled to “pivot” when the company found it was unable to gain traction in the traditional search market. I’m sure we’ll see more such examples of “search” startups that need to shift into adjacent areas to gain adoption. Do@ may be next.

Kosmix will now become part of the newly established “@WalmartLabs.”

When it launched in 2006 Kosmix was building a better search engine that organized results by category and added numerous filters allowing users to drill down for more relevance and control.

Below is an early Kosmix search results page (via DailyTech):

When it became clear that Kosmix wasn’t viable as a general purpose search engine the company shifted its model — multiple times. The company evolved into a vertical search engine and then into a collection of structured content pages or homepages for topics.

Behind it all was a massive taxonomy (not unlike Pandora) that made connections between places, things, entities and products. Kosmix used its technology to assemble multimedia rich Wikipedia-like “topic pages”  for different queries or subjects. Below is an example for Las Vegas:

These local pages could have beaten Google Places to the punch but the company didn’t make a promised major push into local. Instead it found great success with a vertical site, RightHealth, which the founders say is “one of the top three health and medical information sites by global reach.”

The company also built personalized news service “MeeHive,” which was a bit ahead of its time and ultimately discontinued. Using the same technology Kosmix later created TweetBeat, “a real-time social media filter.”

Clearly the Kosmix technology is versatile and the founders creative. Walmart will use the technology (and founders) to develop social and mobile applications. Here’s what Walmart said in its release announcing the acquisition:

“We are expanding our capabilities in today’s rapidly growing social commerce environment,” said Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart’s vice chairman. “Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores. We are excited to have the Kosmix team join us to accelerate the development of our social and mobile commerce offerings.”

Here’s Kosmix co-founder Anand Rajaraman discussing how Kosmix will be implemented at Walmart in more detail:

Quite a few of us at Kosmix have backgrounds in ecommerce, having worked at companies such as Amazon.com and eBay. As we worked on the Social Genome platform, it became apparent to us that this platform could transform ecommerce by providing an unprecedented level of understanding about customers and products, going well beyond purchase data. The Social Genome enables us to take search, personalization and recommendations to the next level.

Although Microsoft might have been a more “logical” buyer, in the context of this history and the wide range of capabilities that Kosmix brings to the retailing giant — but e-commerce laggard — it makes a good deal of sense.

Google News: A Copy Editor’s Nightmare

Consider this page from Google News, the “Muammar al-Gaddafi” page that pulls in headlines from all over the world about the leader:

That page would give any newspaper copy editor fits, given that there are at least four different spellings showing up:

• al-Gaddafi
• Gaddafi
• al-Qaddafi
• Qaddafi

That’s just for the leader’s last name. His first name is spelled in at least two different ways, on that page.

A Name By Any Other Spelling Doesn’t Search As Sweet

Now consider people who keyword search for news. If they search for kadhafi, they get these headlines:

Now search for exactly the same person, only with a different spelling of gaddafi, and you get a different set of results, lead by different publications:

Notice that quote at the top of the page? That quote page again reflects the lack of unity on spelling Gaddafi’s news in the journalism world:

Survey Says: News Organizations Disagree

I checked several major news publications in the United States, as well as the UK, Canada and some for India and Japan. You can see the lack of agreement, even among the three major wire services, AP, AFP and Reuters, which I also checked:

Gaddafi: Reuters (Wire), Washington Post (US), Huffington Post (US),  The Guardian (UK), The Telegraph (UK), The Times (UK), The Mirror (UK), The Sun (UK), The Mail (UK), Bild (Germany), Times Of India (India), Daily Yomiuri (Japan). Asahi Shimbun (Japan)

Gadhafi: Associated Press (Wire), Wall Street Journal (US), USA Today (US), San Jose Mercury News (US), Chicago Tribune (US), Toronto Star (Canada), The Globe & Mail (Canada)

Kadafi: Los Angeles Times (US)

Khadafy: New York Daily News (US) & New York Post (US)

Kadhafi: AFP (Wire)

Qaddafi: New York Times (US)

At first glance, most publications seem to go with “Gaddafi,” but that’s largely due to the UK. Every major UK publication I checked used that spelling, unlike the disagreement among US papers and the wire services. Two major Canadian papers went with “Gadhafi.”

Even Gaddafi Doesn’t Say What’s Right

Who’s right? An interesting AP story suggests that the AP is writing the name in English as Gadhafi (the AP spelling) would prefer:

The Associated Press goes with Gadhafi. Why? It has to do with pronunciation – along with a series of letters the Libyan leader sent to American schoolchildren more than 25 years ago….

How does Gadhafi himself pronounce it? That’s easy since he refers to himself in third person quite often. He tends to say “Gath-thafi” with the middle letter pronounced like the soft “th” in “either.”….

Flash back to 1986, a year that started out with the AP (and many others) spelling the Libyan leader’s name Khadafy, based on the advice of Middle East experts. That changed when he sent letters to American schoolchildren, signed in Arabic script over his typed name: Colonel Moammar El-Gadhafi.

The story goes on to say that, however, the AP also chooses to drop the definitive marker of “El” from names, which is why it ends up with “Gadhafi” — which isn’t, in the end, how he seems to write it.

Then again, The Reid Report does a fantastic round-up on how on what’s apparently Gaddafi’s official site, he goes with “Al Gathafi” there. That round-up also covers a number of spellings used in 2002, where the Libyan Broadcasting Corporation disagrees with Gaddafi’s official site as well as the Libyan embassy — not to mention the US White House.

The Library Of Congress & SEO From 1986

It also points to a 1986 article from The Straight Dope which found at least 12 different spellings used by major media outlets. It lists what apparently the US Library of Congress had as guidelines on his name, which makes me think the library must have been employing an SEO way back before we had search engine optimization:

For the record, here’s the official Library of Congress rundown on how to spell ol’ whatsisname:

(1) Muammar Qaddafi, (2) Mo’ammar Gadhafi, (3) Muammar Kaddafi, (4) Muammar Qadhafi, (5) Moammar El Kadhafi, (6) Muammar Gadafi, (7) Mu’ammar al-Qadafi, (8) Moamer El Kazzafi, (9) Moamar al-Gaddafi, (10) Mu’ammar Al Qathafi, (11) Muammar Al Qathafi, (12) Mo’ammar el-Gadhafi, (13) Moamar El Kadhafi, (14) Muammar al-Qadhafi, (15) Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi, (16) Mu’ammar Qadafi, (17) Moamar Gaddafi, (18) Mu’ammar Qadhdhafi, (19) Muammar Khaddafi, (20) Muammar al-Khaddafi, (21) Mu’amar al-Kadafi, (22) Muammar Ghaddafy, (23) Muammar Ghadafi, (24) Muammar Ghaddafi, (25) Muamar Kaddafi, (26) Muammar Quathafi, (27) Muammar Gheddafi, (28) Muamar Al-Kaddafi, (29) Moammar Khadafy, (30) Moammar Qudhafi, (31) Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi, (32) Mulazim Awwal Mu’ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi.

SNL From 1981 On News Confusion

But wait, there’s even more. Looking further back, Tim Ruder from Perfect Market got big laughs at our recent SMX West conference, when he showed a clip from Saturday Night Live in 1981 that was made fun of the issue:

The clip itself isn’t online that I can easily find right now for free (it’s from Season 7, Episode 8 for those with access via Netflix), but Perfect Market posted a transcript here (and the opening image for this story comes from that post). The transcript begins:

This man, Libyan leader, Col. Moammar Kadaffi, has been the study of intense news coverage this week by every major news organization in America. However, every time his name appears in print, it has a different spelling.

How Do People Search For Gaddafi?

If Gaddafi himself doesn’t make clear how people should spell his name in non-Arabic alphabets, and the news publications can’t agree, can we crowdsource a solution? How are people searching for the man?

Here, we have more agreement. The chart below is from Google Trends, which shows how people are searching from around the world. I checked on the six spellings used by the major publications above, to see which were the most searched for over the past 30 days:

You can only look at five terms at a time on Google Trends, but I quickly determined by running various combinations that “khadafy” is the least popular on the list. As for the others, “gaddafi” was the most popular spelling used by searchers, followed by “kadhafi” and the rest.

Search Popularity Says: “Gaddafi”

The chart above shows this via trend lines — “gaddafi” is well above the others, over the past 30 days. Above the trend lines, you can also see little bar charts that reflect popularity, which I’ve enlarged over to the right.

The numbers are an index value, based off the most popular term, “gaddafi.” They tell you in relation to that, “kadhafi” is only 44% as popular, “kadafi” is 34% as popular, “gadhafi” is 20% popular and “qaddafi” is way back at 8% as popular.

News Sites Ignore What Searchers Seek

What’s especially interesting is the lower line chart. This is “news reference” volume, and it shows how often each word is used in news stories, rather than how popular the term is based on searches.

You can see that the second most popular term is “gadhafi” as written in news stories that Google has collected, despite that being the fourth most popular term that people actually use. That’s a disconnect that some news publications may wish to reconsider.

News Search Also Says: “Gaddafi”

Indeed, using another tool, Google Insights For Search, you can see what terms are most popular specifically among those doing news searches.

Below is a chart showing the trend over the past seven days, and I’ve tucked the key with some index values on the side (note, the chart was set to seven days, but Google Insights only reported five days of data, for some reason):

This is similar to what we saw for the data from general searches — “gaddafi” is above the rest, though for a few days, “kadhafi” was more popular. If you go out further, sometimes “gaddafi” leads (as over the last 90 days or over the past three years), while sometimes “kadhafi” does (as over the past year).

Popularity Can Vary By Country

Location also matters. In the United States, it’s “gaddafi” far more than other spellings, according to Google Insights:

The same was true when I did spot checks for the UK and Canada. But in France, it’s “kadhafi” that leads:

Influence Of Google’s Own Suggestions

Finally, could Google itself be influencing how people search? Certainly, given that it will suggest terms. Those are based on how most people search, of course, but they can cause people to shift.

Consider someone who might think to search for “gadhafi,” and what they get, as they start typing that in:

See how Google suggests that they search for “gaddafi” — that’s going to cause some of them to select this option, regardless of what they originally started typing.

However, it doesn’t work this way for “kadhafi,” which is the second most popular search term. Start typing that in, and you get this:

In this case, there’s nothing that pushes people to instead complete a search for “kadhafi.”

Meanwhile, at Google News, typing in “kad…” causes the suggest box — which uses different data than at regular Google — to list “kadafi” as the top term along with “kadhafi” and “gaddafi” as suggestions:

Should Your Spelling Style Be Based On Search?

The takeaway from all this? I don’t think the decades of confusion will suddenly get resolved. However, if I were a news publication, I’d be using tools like these above to get a better idea about how my particular audience is searching for Gaddafi and using the spelling that makes the most sense based on that.

Sorry, New York Times — going with “Qaddafi” probably makes little sense. But at least you’re better than the New York Daily News and the New York Post going with the even less popular “khadafy.”

Postscript: Doug Edwards points me to a West Wing episode where White House chief of staff Leo McGarry takes issue with the New York Times and the spelling it uses, a least in relation to its crossword puzzle. Here’s the clip:

(featured home page image via Shutterstock.com)

This is a breakout product for the company that could become highly successful and build much increased levels of engagement and potentially even revenue. Whereas many of the personalized or social news platforms have little or no brand recognition, LinkedIn’s brand is much more visible and widely known.

LinkedIn Today is entirely consistent with that brand. It’s at once obvious and seems to come out of nowhere.

Until very recently LinkedIn appeared to be a staid and stodgy network beside the sexier and faster-moving Facebook and Twitter. However, Linkedin Today may change all that.

The creation of LinkedIn Groups and Twitter integration made LinkedIn somewhat more “engaging” and increased usage frequency. Now LinkedIn Today has the capacity to dramatically increase usage and create a new daily (or more frequent) news habit.

The site is totally algorithmically generated; there are no humans involved. Users can follow news publications/blogs or industries. Their contacts and connections also help determine what items gets surfaced on the site.

As I mentioned it now seems like an obvious move in a way. But it certainly wasn’t obvious I’m sure. Credit CEO Jeff Weiner and his team for their creativity. This also spices things up for investors before the company’s coming IPO.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The change was spotted by Search Engine Watch. Propeller was pitched as a challenger to Digg’s throne. But that never materialized. Its home page is currently filled with submitted stories that only have one or two votes, many of which are spammy content about ATV rentals, plumbing, loans, and carpet services.

Meanwhile, the king of social news/voting sites is also struggling mightily. In a blog post yesterday, Hitwise shared charts showing dramatic losses in traffic to Digg both from U.S. and U.K. Internet users.

Hitwise says U.K. traffic to Digg is down 34% since the end of August; U.S. traffic has dropped by 26% in the same timeframe. That’s when Digg relaunched version 4 of its site, a change that was widely panned by many of Digg’s most loyal users.

A common perception has been that these loyal Digg voters shifted to Reddit.com, but Hitwise says that’s not necessarily the case, at least where the U.K. is concerned:

“…although the decrease in visits to digg is highly noticeable, there hasn’t been a correlating spike in traffic to reddit. During the same period of decline in the UK for digg, reddit only increased its visitors by 2.6%.”

On the other hand, one of Reddit’s founders recently posted an infographic that shows Reddit has surpassed Digg in terms of page views. That and more about Reddit’s current position is in this Nick Douglas article.

As a disclaimer, I should also point out what many of you already know: Our sister site, Sphinn, recently dropped voting altogether in favor of publishing content curated by a team of editors. I’m the Editor-in-Chief at Sphinn.

Postscript: ReadWriteWeb recently updated an article about Digg/Reddit with additional details, including Hitwise saying that U.S. visits to Reddit have increased 15% since the new Digg launched. And a Reddit employee shared a Google Analytics screenshot showing clear traffic growth in the same timeframe.

The study surveyed more than 2,200 online news consumers between December 28, 2009, and January 19, 2010, and found that more than half of online news readers use a major news portal on a typical day, and among younger news consumers (aged 18-29), more than two-thirds visit news portals like Yahoo News or Google News. The news portals beat out all other online news sources among all three age groups.

Also noteworthy is that the Facebook-related news sources scored dramatically higher than Twitter.

The study also cites Nielsen and Hitwise data that shows Yahoo News was the top online news site in 2009.

Some other interesting findings from the Pew study:

• About 71% of internet users, or 53% of all American adults, get their news online; that number has been relatively steady in recent years.
• Only 35% of online news consumers have a favorite site. Most news consumers rely on multiple sources to get their news.
• Of that 35%, only 19% said they’d be willing to pay for news online.

If you’re interested in news, and online news specifically, there’s a lot of thought-provoking material in the report. You can read it online or download the report via PewInternet.org or StateoftheMedia.org.

On June 25 last year, Farrah Fawcett died. Then stories on Twitter and elsewhere about Michael Jackson dying. Huge traffic to news sites before anything confirmed. Big change from in the past when you’d hear things from news sources only after confirmed.

So to set the day off, two big celebrities dies. Huge interest. Many didn’t believe Jackson had, then TMZ reported, then more began to believe something that seemed to be unbelievable was true. Then news started coming out that Jeff Goldblum had died.

All was based off a report from small site called Global Associated News. People linked to that as the source that the new rumor was true. But this was a hoax web site that you could fill in with any name and fake a death in an accident. (see our story from the time, Jeff Goldblum Is NOT Dead, Despite What Google Says).

So how do you suss out what’s real or not in a world that’s more and more confusing. Megan’s tips based on her experience as an online editor and journalist.

Know Your Source
Is the name of the site the name as the domain? TMZ matched TMZ.com. Global Associated News had a domain name of mediafetcher.com.

Try a search on the source. If you’d searched for “global associated news” on Google, seeing a story like “Global Associated News Shatters Masturbation World Record” as third listing might make you do a second thought about this as a solid news source.

See a tweet with news? Shows example of Mark Hendrickson tweeting that MySpace CEO was joining Plancast. But some didn’t click on the story link, which was a RickRoll. And then some sites like The Next Web wrote a story just off that tweet, not checking further.

Know The Big Picture

If you know more about the players, you might understand more about what’s going on. Is someone formerly with a company? Do they have an agenda?

Questions

How do you deal with people who constantly barrage you with what seems to be conspiracy theories? Ask them for proof, their sources, how they know it.

How about stories that are nuanced. Not yes or no but shades of truth or fiction? There’s always going to be people who want to spin things in some way. But if you know the big picture, then you have a better sense of both sides. Knowing more about what’s going on, being more media literate takes some of the edge off.