arghyle

I read the news today oh, boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, i just had to laugh
I saw the photograph

- Beatles, A Day In the Life

The hottest web news of the past few days have definitely been Daylife. This startup is a new aggregation site, which is not something that is particularly exciting, but it has had some big name investors, a lot of exposure, and help from some smart people.

To abbreviate the FAQ page- basically the site gets its news “constantly from thousands of sources around the globe, including mainstream outlets (e.g. BBC, CNN, Times of India), blogs, peer-reviewed journals, and many others” then “analyzes the news to find connections among stories, to present their timelines, and to find new ways of looking at the news and how it’s being covered worldwide” and finally they “order articles through a combination of relevance to the subject at hand, timeliness, and the kind of publication it comes from”. Pretty simple, right?
One twist is that Daylife is not totally automated news like Google News, but rather has real editors making real decisions about what is important. Jeff Jarvis blogged that the only thing those editors are contributing is that they decide what’s goes on the front page, the cover as it were. The cover is a large Flash graphic with an overlayed title that links to a story. If you don’t like that story, there is a scrolling bar under it with more images that link to notable stories from today and few days before. Personally, this does nothing for me and rather than giving me a big overview of the days news, it highlights a few stories that someone else thinks are important. If you don’t want to read them you have to go to the nav bar on top and move along.

This is not a review, so I won’t get into too many details, but the front page has a ranking of the ten top stories from seven categories, a quote, and then links to important people, places, and organizations. The 10 big stories route users to a secondary page where you think there would be a comments sections but there is none, rather there is just more links and related news. Related news is one of the main themes of Daylife, finding connections between stories and events. Not a bad idea, so long as you are supposing people are generally interested in topics, not just scanning so they know what is going on in the world. As many people have pointed out, there is no RSS functionality yet, but the word is that it is in the works.
So for the cover think newspaper, without the massive layoffs or inky fingers, but once you get inside its a lot of internal links and pull-quotes. It is definitely an interesting take on news aggregation, but inside its confusing and the focus is not the story itself, but rather the connetions. Unlike Google News or Techmeme which send you right to the story you want, there is a lot of searching and clicking involved and I still don’t really understand what Daylife is offering me that I can’t get elsewhere. Their attempt at a news “ecosystem” is great, but I think they are long on ideas and short on implementation.

For the record- I did laugh when I saw the photograph (cover page). It’s a 1999 splash page that offers nothing except a pretty picture and it gets between me and the information I want.

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