The New York Daily News invested $4 million this January in Loud3r, a content curation service built on top of extensive Natural Language Proccessing and other forms of technical analysis. The end result is a powerful tool than any curation geek would drool over. Already deployed by a small number of customers, Loud3r is generally available now. Check out the screenshots below of this new curation service that's just dripping with cool features.

This service is aimed at professional publishers, there's a modest monthly fee per topic area you're curating. Whether you're in the target market or not, here's a look at one of the most cutting-edge services in this emerging market.

Competitors include OneSpot and DayLife.

Your stream - made by hand
These screens are a demo Loud3r account set up to track content about the topic "data analysis." Click any of the following screens for a larger pop-up.

Project home page

Keyword synonyms and blacklist

Keyword recommendations

Dial the filters up and down

Sort the stream

That's a little look behind the scenes at Loud3r. There's a whole lot there. The semantic and Natural Language Processing is the secret sauce, but throughout the service there are good features that any curation tool would benefit from including.

Are these kinds of tools the printing press of the 21st century? Original content will always be important, but it's easier than ever to publish now. That means there are all kinds of opportunities to ad value built on top of the rushing river of news online.

Mashups Mashups Mashups

We learned about the Daylife contest today on Programmable Web, the leading blog and database about public APIs and mashups. PW must have felt obligated to be polite and just report on the contest, albeit weeks after the winners were announced.

We were really excited to learn about the contest - Daylife is a company with some good technology, offering news content with some structure to it. What could make more interesting fodder for mashups than structured news data? It turns out almost anything could, if you judge from what came out of it.

If you can't see the video above where we look at the mashup contest entrants, here's a Flash version.

To take a tour of all the applications discussed in the video, you can visit this link.

There Is Still Potential Here

The examples that came out of the contest are all relatively dismal, with the exception of the touchscreen news reading interface. Over on Programmable Web's page about mashups built on the Daylife API though, we found one very cool one. TreeHugger's GRNDX tracks media mentions of a number of words related to the environment. (No one cares about the environment this week, apparently, the Olympics are all anyone cares about.)

That's pretty awesome - even if Treehugger calls it more fun than scientific. Fair enough, but let's see more apps like this instead of the wacky stuff that dominated the Daylife contest.