The latest attempt to sort through the clutter of available online news content is version 2.0 of News360, an app for the iPad, the iPhone, the BlackBerry PlayBook, Windows Phone and Android devices, and the Web that uses semantic analysis to analyze users’ activity on social services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, and Evernote to select relevant news.

Read More: News360 Version 2.0 Analyzes Social Network Activity to Curate News Content

Google News implemented a few tweaks to become more tablet-friendly for owners of iPads and Android devices.

Read More: Google News Tweaks Aimed at iPad, Android Tablets

When a big news event is unfolding quickly, it can difficult to keep track of the latest news updates. Here we take a look at ways to keep on top of breaking news, and to cover it yourself.

Twitter

Well, it has to be in here, doesn't it? Many people look to Twitter for breaking news now, and there's lots of it to be found. People often follow hashtags associated with news they're interested in, but the search results for these tags can sometimes be far too busy to keep up with. Then there [...]

Read More: 6 ways to follow, and report, breaking news events online

Social media curation and publishing platform Storify is now delivering breaking news from Breaking News.

Read More: Breaking News: Breaking News Teams Up with Storify

Facebook has been trying to figure out its News Feed since it launched in 2006, and of course because it's Facebook every time it changes absolutely anything it seems to through users into of tumult. Earlier today the company launched the latest incremental step in its quest to try to make sense of the sheer amount of realtime data it processes: Aggregated topic clusters in the Facebook News Feed.

Read More: Facebook Clusters Topics In News Feed, Opens Can Of Worms

The past two nights saw violence and looting in north London as protesters took to the streets – first to express their frustration with the police following a recent shooting, and then last night, it seems, simply to cause trouble and get free goods from shops.With TV news struggling to keep up and Twitter racing ahead of events like an excited child, we really need trustworthy people to sort truth from fiction in real time on Twitter – it's one of the new functions of journalism. B [...]

Read More: London riots needed Twitter news curators, but where are they and who pays for them?

TechCrunch describes Editions by AOL for the iPad as trying to stake a position somewhere between The Daily’s all-original (and expensive) reporting and Flipboard‘s endless pages of prettified RSS feeds and social streams However, after playing with the free app for a while, I would say it looks a lot like Flipboard but without any of the social news curation. And, while the app draws content from professional news organizations like ABC, CBS and the Washington Post, it lacks (by design) the ed [...]

Read More: Editions by AOL for iPad News App is Interesting but Feels Like a Beta

We've taken some of the biggest news stories of the week and put them together for you in TechCrunched.

On the heels of recent management changes at Twitter, the company is now changing the way brands interact with users. Follow a brand you like and you’ll see their ads pop up in your Twitter stream. Over in the travel space, Airbnb experienced the best and worst of the business world, while back online the code for Facebook's iPad app was found in an unlikely place. And finally, lots of people [...]

Read More: TechCrunched: News In 90 Seconds

 "Gamification" seems to be the up and coming buzz word. You may recall that in April, I covered Empire Avenue in a post about the gamification of social media. Now, Google is in the news (literally) with a gamification project of their own, and I think it has some potential.

Let's explore why.

This week Google announced the launch of their Google News Badges. Google heralded the launch with the following description:

The U.S. Edition of Google News n [...]

Read More: The Gamification of News

Once again, we're packaging some of the top news of the week in a quick-to-digest video format.  If you missed some of the big tech stories this week, TechCrunched gives you the highlights. Take a look, have a listen and let us know what you think. Also, be sure to visit the below links for additional insights.

Read More: TechCrunched: News Highlights In Under Two Minutes

The phone-hacking scandal at and subsequent shuttering of News Corp.-owned British tabloid News of the World dominated news links shared via Twitter for the week of July 4-8, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index, while the most-watched news and politics video on YouTube was footage of the July 5 sandstorm in Phoenix, and the most shared news story in the blogosphere was a report that the White House is preparing to keep as m [...]

Read More: New Media Index: News of the World Is News of the Twitterverse

Pulse, an app that delivers news content to mobile phones and tablets including Android devices, the iPhone, and the iPad, will add fare from msnbc.com under terms of an agreement between the two parties, announced Wednesday.

Read More: News Reader App Pulse Adds msnbc.com Content

When I was a kid, I remember my dad coming home from work and telling my mom he'd had to fire someone. I very vividly remember the image it conjured in my head. MY dad had set some poor man on fire! What about his family? What about MY family? Was my dad going to [...]

Read More: Communication Lessons from News of the World

This guest post is by Greg McFarlane. If there are already 100,000 posts out there that express a particular viewpoint, what’s the point of adding a 100,001st? Look for a different angle. If you can’t find one, then resist the temptation to rehash conventional wisdom, and go unearth yourself some unrelated subject matter. When you’re [...]

Read More: Think Twice Before You Use News as Inspiration

There are few things that jump start one’s day as swiftly as a strong cup of coffee and a serving of news. But how do you find and enjoy the perfect cup of hand picked news?“The Internet has created a lot of content, which is why everyone today is talking about curation and filtering. We think filtering is great but it’s a feature not a product. The real opportunity is for people to contextualize, and to be able to create content around that content,” says Noah Brier, the [...]

Read More: Percolate is brewing: Your filtered news with a shot of microblogging