If you’ve been paying attention to the web lately, or the special lady in your life according to its demographics, you might know that the curation service Pinterest is on fire. The site lets you add interesting things you find on the web to a virtual pinboard to share with your friends.

Trapit on the other hand is a service that launched in November that does the searching for you, based on keywords having to do with your interests. The two services might be a match made in heaven for pinning when paired together.

I spoke with Trapit co-founder & Chief Product Officer Hank Nothhaft today about that very topic, along with how Trapit is doing since its launch. He shared some interesting stats with me, and says the site has had 3M unique users since launch, and those users save 10 searches on average, which the company calls “traps”. The site also signs up an impressive 20k unique users a day.

Today, the service has launched a simple integration with Pinterest with a big payoff for users of both sites.

Let Trapit find cool things to pin

When you sign up for Trapit, all you have to do is enter a search phrase and the site the will find relevant news and sites on the web that match it. The sources are vetted, so you won’t get a bunch of junk and spam like when you use Google Alerts for a similar reason.

More importantly, you can interact with the things that Trapit finds and just by giving it a thumbs up or down, the service learns a bit more about your tastes and refines future search results you to better suit you.

In the example above, I’ve told Trapit to find stories for me about the Super Bowl, and within seconds, the results start pouring in. I can save that search as a “trap”, and the service will continually find me new things about the subject. You can click on individual stories for reading or sharing, as well as clearing them out of the “Trap”. By doing so, Trapit knows what type of content to focus on for you.

Since Trapit is doing all of the heavy lifting for you by way of searching for new items continually for all of your traps, an integration with Pinterest is absolutely perfect. Consider Trapit as the discovery engine for your pinboards. If you have a pinboard full of things that are orange, simply create a Trap for it and watch the content flow in. Once you find something, you’ll now be able to share it directly on Pinterest.

The reason why Trapit is now focusing on sending content to Pinterest is because the company noticed all of the inbound traffic it was getting from the site. Nothhaft told me that Pinterest easily sends them 5-6 times the traffic that Tumblr or StumbleUpon does. The company also had users asking them for the ability to easily pin content found on its site, so the feature was a no-brainer, plus the founders are already power users of the site.

If you’re a Pinterest Pro like the founders of Trapit and want to find a steady stream of cool things to share on Pinterest, then it’s worth giving the site a try. Even if you’re not a Pinterest user, finding really interesting things is made simple with Trapit, as they have sections of the site dedicated to featured Traps and hot content.

➤ Trapit

Every year, Google does its Zeitgeist, which compiles all of the trending topics based on what people searched for on its site. Some interesting trends showed up this year, but the local trends jumped out at me.

In a blog post today, Google shared that in almost every U.S. city it looked at, the top ten local search terms showed that people were trying to find local news. In a world where news is available everywhere, including the Internet and cable TV, that’s an interesting finding.

Here’s more from Google on the topic:

Pittsburgh, PA was the most media-hungry city in Zeitgeist this year, with all of their top 5 terms related to local news stations, while in New York City and Houston, TX, no news sources made the top ten lists.

It makes sense that larger markets like New York City and Houston wouldn’t be interested in local news stations, since a lot of happenings in those cities make it to the mainstream U.S. news on its own. The findings show that even though the Internet is vast, people still want to know what’s going on around them, and they look to their local news stations as a major source.

In addition to searchers wanting local news, the top ten local search terms also included education, civic services, entertainment, and activities.

So if you thought that world news and the Internet were replacing “film at 11″, you’d be wrong. People want to know what’s happening right down the street.

When you’re muddling through your Twitter activity stream and Facebook Newsfeed, you’ll see more information then you’ll ever actually interact with. Picking and choosing what to read, and what to pass on can be a bit difficult.

The company Twosift wants to help you sift through the wreckage that can be the Internet, and leverages known leaders in different verticals to bring you the news and information you should pay attention to first.

While I rely on my friends to bubble up awesome content, if you’re interested in getting to the heart of the matter on what’s hot in technology, business, or politics, the Twosift approach isn’t a bad one.

The free iPad only app is gorgeous, and has an interface that anyone can figure out.

Getting the news from the people who make it

Instead of waiting for an article from David Pogue, or a tweet from Tim Ferris, why not use Twosift to see what they’re up to and talking about in real-time? That’s what Twosift wants you to do, but is that the way people really want to find important things?

We follow notable celebrities and thought leaders on Twitter, so it would make sense to bring in the best of the best to one place.

When you open the app, you’re presented with the default “celebrities” that are handpicked by Twosift.

Of course, if you aren’t interested in what the defaults have to say, you can add another one of the chosen ones, broken up by Business, Health and Literature, Media, Politics, and Technology. There are currently 76 people to choose from to place on your Twosift main page.

The unfortunate part about Twosift is that you can’t customize the app by adding a new person or feed like you can with Flipboard. This will most certainly cause ego driven “leaders” to clamber for their own addition to the app.

What’s Arrington up to these days?

Once you tap into a person’s feed on Twosift, the latest tweets, public Facebook posts, and articles that they’ve linked to and written are shown in little boxes. If you tap on something, the piece of media is opened within the app. This is helpful, as I dislike being kicked to the Safari browser by an app. The app updates itself in real-time, and actually is a handy way to keep up on news as driven by actual newsmakers, rather than friends in different parts of the world with interests that might not be shared by you.

Missing from the Twosift app oddly, are actual celebrities. While I feel like Michael Arrington and Bill Gates are brilliant people, with amazing things to say, the app seems to focus on the geeky set appreciate the new way of consuming news. I’m assuming that Twosift is anointing these people as “Internet Celebrities”.

An actual entertainment section featuring celebrities who create and share a lot of media would be welcomed. For example, Wil Wheaton generates a ton of great content, and I would gladly follow all of his musings in the Twosift app.

The company says that it’s “just getting started”, so perhaps they will add some more interesting Internet celebrities to follow on the app. The change in distribution methods is an interesting one, as social media is relying on prominent individuals to spread information more and more, rather than publications. While publications generate most of the content, these folks most certainly help propagate it to the masses.

Do you prefer to follow publications, or would you rather get your news blessed from people who know their stuff? Tell us in the comments.

➤ Twosift

If you’re worried about finding yourself driving into a lake and not knowing what to do once you hit the water, this news report explains exactly what you should do.

The reporter explains that the experience is “not like they show in the movies”, while the woman featured in the story explains it as “weird”. I’m not sure that I’d share the same restraint with my words.

Google announced some upcoming upgrades to its Google Reader product today on its blog, here are some details:

In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.

As a result of these changes, we also think it’s important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader’s social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week’s time we’ll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

Using Reader for your RSS feeds has been simple enough, but since Google+ was introduced, there has been a major disconnect between the two products. Luckily, Google hasn’t forgotten about Reader, and is making sweeping changes.

If you prefer to take your feeds elsewhere and aren’t interested in its new upgrade, Google says you can take your feeds with you and points out that “your data belongs to you, after all”.

We think the end result is better than what’s available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you. That’s why we will also be extending Reader’s subscription export feature to include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, and we want to make sure you can take it with you.

• Your subscriptions
• Your shared items
• Your friends
• Your likes
• Your starred items

Sharing news easily with your circles is what Google+ has been missing, and should be a welcomed with open arms by publishers everywhere. Copying and pasting links into Google+ or even using the +1 button on individual stories has most definitely slowed down the flow of news in streams. This will kick things up quite a bit.

Could it be that the mighty tablet is here to save the day for news publications? Well, yes, if this latest report is anything to go by.

As newspapers and magazines rush to app-ify themselves for the world’s tech-heads, it transpires that there’s very good reason for doing so, as reported today by PaidContent:UK.

It seems that tablet users spend rather a lot of time consuming news on their devices – up to five times more than the time spent on publications’ websites.

TigerSpike develops mobile apps for the likes of Telegraph Media Group, The Economist and The Australian and Mail Online, where it says that the average app engagement time is 30-40 minutes per visit.

This is good news for tablets, which many people feared initially would struggle to find a niche in the market. But with smartphones too small to properly read on, and laptops typically too cumbersome to carry everywhere, it seems tablets are definitely finding their feet in a pretty crowded technological marketplace.

Following on from last week’s report on how some newspapers were performing in the digital usability league, it seems that apps are very much the future for news vendors, but mobile devices also affect when and how we consume the news, as we reported earlier this year. So publications need to invest the resources in developing user-friendly platforms and understand how users like to engage with it. Cutting corners to cut costs is a false economy in the long run.

I’ve written before about how new media isn’t destroying journalism. There will always be a need for qualified fact-checkers and reliable news sources – social networking platforms such as Twitter are just tools, and journalists have to move with the times and use all the tools at their disposal.

A key theme within this area is how news sites are letting the end-user choose what news they receive. Some have argued that tailored news dissemination will lead many people to miss out on key global events, which is why journalists and publications should decide what news people consume.

I don’t necessarily agree entirely with this assertion, but a new paper by Neil Thurman, a journalism academic based at City University in London, reaffirms the notion that people want to have professionals filtering and packaging news for them.

Making ‘The Daily Me’: Technology, economics and habit in the mainstream assimilation of personalized news is the culmination of two years research by Thurman, and as reported in the Guardian today, it follows hot on the heels of the Washington Post’s new personalized news website, Trove.

Thurman asserts that “readers are reluctant to take on the role of editorial selection, and still enjoy serendipitous discovery.”

Indeed, it seems that news consumption has traditionally always been about passive consumption – we read what we’re given. And I think Thurman’s findings are applicable to many people, who are simply too busy to hand-pick what news they receive. After all, it’s the job of a journalist to decide what’s newsworthy and what’s not.

The Interactive Editor of BBC News, Steve Herrmann, also said that he felt the “time and effort to personalize something” would deter most people from doing so.

Thurman’s paper found that active personalization (e.g. homepage customization) by readers did grow by 20%, but passive personalization (e.g. RSS feeds) grew by 60% over the same timeframe.

Over the two year period of the study, The Daily Telegraph and The Sun newspapers in the UK, and New York Times in the US, all stopped pushing their personalised news services, which is indicative of the lack of up-take.

Ultimately, it’s all about choice. Some people want to pick what they read about, others are happy to be spoon-fed, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.