The screen capture above is from Tech Investor News, one of my favorite Websites. It is an aggregation service that pulls in RSS feeds from a variety of sources, all tech-focused, and organizes the feeds into a variety of relevant categories. The image above is from the “Blogs + Tech Dialogue” section.

While TIN does a great job of assembling content from many great sources and presenting it all logically, the problem highlighted above is one that affects all similar services. Clearly, a sponsored post (advertisement) and a story about Charlie Sheen’s troubled marriage have no place in this timeline.

Technology that will filter such content without affecting desirable articles at least occasionally, is something needs to happen. With as many smart people focused on the future of digital content as there are right now — and have been for years — I would think more progress would have been made.

Techmeme does a good job of filtering, but it’s thanks entirely to a human element. The same is true for All Things Digital’s Voices column — in fact, I believe each and every story on Voices is added by a person. The human editor does things that automatic aggregation currently cannot of course, but it also introduces a new problem in the form of bias. Humans always have some amount of bias that is inherent to our nature and as such, we’ll never be suited for this particular task.

So, brilliant developers and rockstar entrepreneurs devoting your lives to finding ways to get rich on the internet, it’s time to get to work. There are thousands of people across the Web churning out quality content that people want to see, and we need better ways to discover and absorb it. Make “the news” smarter.