Daylife Establishes a New Way to View News
Daylife, a startup that Jeff Jarvis is working on, rolled out its public beta today. I have been an alpha tester for the past few months.
The site aggregates content from news sites and a selection of blogs. Like Topix, Daylife categorizes the news based on the content into distinct topical pages - like this one on YouTube. In addition, the site pulls key quotes from stories and breaks them out in a sidebar. You can take a tour here. One of my favorite features are the Daylife covers. It offers a clear view of the top stories in a way that harkens back to the day when print ruled.
Daylife may not be the most comprehensive news site on the web, but it's a winner. It aggregates content in a compelling way that is easy to read. That's something we sorely need in a world of limitless choices.
Technorati Tags: Daylife, Jeff Jarvis
Are you serious, Steve?
I'm a Jeff Jarvis fan as well-- but really, they had a year and half to work on this thing, and the results are stunningly underwhelming. There are a million aggregation and meme-tracking sites that do the same thing, and a lot better-- techmeme, newsvine, topix, etc, etc, etc.
Sometimes I wonder if your PR background makes it impossible for you to call things accurately, especially when your friends/colleagues/influencers are involved. Because even Michael Arrington stepped up to the plate and said that this site was not good-- and he's involved with it up to his eyeballs.
Are you so scared of offending the people involved that you're unable to be a little more objective?
Posted by: anonymous | Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 03:54 PM
I've seen something like this before...it's called the BBC.
Posted by: Paul Fabretti | Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 04:08 PM
Anonymous, hardly. Suggest we all put on our anti-geek glasses and look at this site through the eye of the consumer who knows nothing about memes, RSS and the like. There's a void for sites that demystify the technology to benefit users.
Oh and if I didn't like it, I would say so - even if Jeff is an FOS. He's criticized Edelman in the past. We're all adults. Theme of the day.
Posted by: Steve Rubel | Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 05:16 PM
I’ve had a quick look at this site and it looks nice. I like the layout although it could do with some more features.
Posted by: Spud | Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 07:07 PM
You nailed it Steve. I showed this site to my mom and my wife today and they both really liked it. Neither of them will ever visit Techmeme or the other geek-favored sites but Daylife has good eye appeal and a kind-of-like-a-magazine display of information. It took about 10 seconds for each of them to understand the MyLife tab and how it gets populated.
The only other online play they have responded to this favorably has been the NY Times Reader for Windows XP and Vista.
No doubt there's more work needed but I think it's a solid first release.
Posted by: Marc Orchant | Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 08:39 PM
What about Techcrunch's thoughts about how this Daylife site isn't RSS enabled and doesn't allow for commenting on the news items? Those would seem to be two huge hang-ups for most people who would be into this sort of thing in the first place.
Posted by: Mike Keliher | Friday, January 05, 2007 at 10:22 AM
This is just another traffic-buildng excerise for our emerging blogging aristoracy. Sprinkle in MSM with hooks to the "a list" blogging crowd, stir and package. What utter, useless crap.
Posted by: kob | Sunday, January 07, 2007 at 02:09 PM