Are you ready to meet Siri's sister? No, not another shrill-voiced digital assistant, but in fact a new discovery engine, brought to you by Siri's sister company, Trapit. Like the iPhone 4S's voice command technology, Trap.it is the product of technologies developed in the CALO - Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes - project. Trapit is now its own company and has begun raising funds, including seeking capital from Horizon Ventures, one the sponsors of Facebook, Spotify and Siri.

So Trapit has an impressive heritage, being descended from a $200 million artificial intelligence project, but what is it about Trapit that differentiates it from the ever-increasing amount of aggregators and discovery engines out there?

Conceptually it's not so different to Stumble Upon, a discovery engine that learns what you do and don't like. However, instead of flicking from page to page, Trapit simultaneously displays several panels related to different subjects- i.e. the trap - that the reader has said they are interested in or are likely to be interested in. When new information is found about those issues, Trapit updates the feed.

The world of journalism has become increasingly entwined with technological developments: the smart-phone and the tablet have become woven into the fabric of day-to-day life, so for many the daily paper, which was once perused during the daily commute, a quick tea break or over lunch has now been replaced with an electronic device. The news from around the world can now fit snugly inside your pocket.

Journalism is fighting a moving battle. That means that applications - for smartphone and tablet - are often the weapons of choice. Every news organisation wants more people to have their app so more people read their digital content - and, crucially, pay for it too. So naturally, the more downloads the better, right?

Actually, that may not be entirely true.

PaidContent points out that in fact download figures don't necessarily indicate financial success, despite the fact that many corporations cite app download figures as proof that this aspect of their digital strategy is working. However, just because an app has been downloaded, doesn't mean it has been used. Facebook applications are measured on the basis of daily active users and monthly active users, which indicate exactly how popular the apps, are in terms of use - a far more accurate measure of success and one that is of far more use to advertisers.

Personalization is quickly becoming a key concept in the world of online news. A new study discovered, however, that most readers are reluctant to actively personalize content, preferring to let someone else do the editorial selection.

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade highlighted a recent study by journalism academic Neil Thurman, titled "Making 'The Daily Me': Technology, economics and habit in the mainstream assimilation of personalized news." The key finding of the study, which was preceded by two years of research, was that readers are far less enthusiastic about news personalization than many think. The whole study can be read here.

According to Thurman, "active personalization," such as homepage customization, grew only 20%. Meanwhile, "passive personalization" in the form of news sites filtering and recommending articles based on browsing behaviour, grew by 60% over the same period. The research also suggested that readers are generally unable to accurately predict their news preferences.

Thurman also noted that during the research, The Washington Post, The Sun, The New York Times and The Daily Telegraph all stopped marketing their "My Page" services - a confirmation that readers have been slow to start using the possibility of personalizing their news.

Just about everyone in the news industry is looking for "new patterns for the future of news".

It seems pretty certain that social networks will play an even more important role in defining the new ways users will consume the news, as will personalization.

Betting on this comes the new platform launched by the Washington Post: Trove, a free news aggregation website which allows users to get a personalized information.

The Washington Post anticipated its launch last February.

As TechCrunch reported, it combines algorithms and the editorial team's expertise to aggregate and offer news from more than 10,000 sources. Trove takes advantage of Facebook Connect - the article said - to pull in user's interests as outlined by his or her Facebook profile to help jump-start the personalization part of the equation.
Users can then create news streams called "channels", which filter news on specific topics - the Los Angeles Times reported - such as Google, Obama, books, sports or whatever he/she is interested in.