• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 15, 2010

To automatically tailor content to consumers' individual tastes, The Washington Post Co. has acquired personalized news aggregation site iCurrent, Online Media Daily confirmed on Thursday. Financial terms of the deal are not being released.

iCurrent lets users automatically aggregate news based on specified topics areas. Users can update pages by adding or removing topics and news sources. Industry blog VentureBeat first reported news of the acquisition on Thursday.

The Washington Post Co. is not publicly discussing plans to integrate iCurrent's technology, but company spokeswoman Rima Calderon said the implications of the deal should be fairly obvious. "You know what [iCurrent's] technology does, and we've said how interested we are in it," Calderon said. However, Calderon added, "I can't tell you exactly what we plan to do with the technology, because I honestly don't know." Calderon also made sure to point out that the deal is "a corporate acquisition," which seemed to imply that iCurrent's technology could impact every property under the company's control.

Founded four years ago, iCurrent only recently debuted a public beta in late January.

Despite concerns over content quality and the fate of journalism, publishers are increasingly investing in technologies to either replace -- or at least support -- the work of editors.

Marking its first acquisition, The Huffington Post last month acquired custom software enterprise Adaptive Semantics. Of interest to HuffPost is the company's machine learning and sentiment analysis technology, which the publisher is hoping will help scale its community.

Meanwhile, AOL raised eyebrows last November when it announced plans to begin partly automating its online news reporting process. Under the auspices of Seed.com, AOL is now employing an algorithmic system that trawls the Web for stories that readers are likely to prefer, and then parses out story assignments among a large freelance staff.

In May, The Washington Post Co. reported that total revenue for the first quarter of the year rose 11%, while newspaper revenue was down 3%. Meanwhile, revenue for the company's magazine division totaled $29.4 million -- a 36% decrease year-over-year. The decline was attributed mainly to a 38% reduction in ad revenue at Newsweek. (The company announced plans to sell Newsweek earlier this year.)

Last November, iCurrent had raised $3 million from Crosslink Capital.