We’ve always admired Amazon’s approach to product design; they aren’t wedded to just algorithms, or just user-generated contributions, or just editorial. They use all available techniques to create a great experience, and that’s the right way to do it.
In that spirit (and thanks to many client requests) we’re introducing the first in a series of curation features that will let editors seamlessly, painlessly, and organically refine their Daylife sites. The Strike feature lets editors permanently remove any element on any Daylife Select page any article, photo, quote, tweet… anything on any page. Strike any item and it’s gone for good.
The smart aggregation Daylife offers helps publishers scale massively, reduce costs, and give their readers a better way to navigate the world, and our clients are finding new and more powerful ways to blend editorial and automation.
Take USA Today’s Cruise Log, where Gene Sloan was writing a blog about cruise travel. He added Daylife, and Cruise Log went from being “editor + blog” to “editor + Daylife”…
It became a massive news portal. And they’ve been able to sell their Daylife-powered pages at premium CPMs.
Daylife lets editors create high-quality, media-rich sites in their brand and voice. And now they’ll have even more finely-grained control to make those automated sites scale without sacrificing editorial integrity.
Ask us for a demo!
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On Friday, we migrated our showcase site, Daylife.com, to Daylife Select, our point-and-click WSYWIG service for building instant content portals.
Daylife Select lets you be a curator and a producer. Using an intuitive point-and-click interface, choose as much fresh content as you want from an endless array of topics, high-quality images (from the wire services and Flickr), articles, videos, quotes, Twitter streams, and more. Smart contextual links interweave all this new content seamlessly with your editorial, adding depth and relevance to every page.
The results are fully hosted, always fresh, and advertiser-friendly. And the customization options are unlimited; you can choose from pre-formatted design templates or edit the CSS directly.
The millions of pages and all the functionality you see on daylife.com—and much, much more—can be yours using Daylife Select. Each page can be configured and customized by you, in your brand, voice, and feel, just as the Wall Street Journal and BigSoccer have done.
To give you an idea of just how easy it is to build rich, engaging content using Daylife Select, we’ve built these pages using a few simple search terms: American Idol — Barack Obama — NCAA — Twitter.
Take a spin through daylife.com, and let us know if you’d like to learn more.
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On Sunday afternoon at SxSW, I’ll be sitting on a panel titled “Get Me Rewrite: Developing APIs and the Changing Face of News.” Jacob Harris of the New York Times is moderating, and I’ll be joined by three of the brightest folks around when it comes to the thinking through and implementing new technology for news organizations: Daniel Jacobson (who created NPR’s API); Brad Stenger, Research Director at Wired Nextfest; and Simon Willison, of Django fame and recent launcher of the Guardian Open Platform.
We’ll talk about the challenges and opportunities offered by APIs in the news space, running the gamut from the technical through the organizational and financial aspects of getting an API up and running, as well as the implications that APIs have for news gathering and consumption.
We hope to dedicated a good chunk of our panel to Q&A… If you’ve got any specific issues you’d like this panel to address, drop me a line. I’m told the panel will be recorded, so you can enjoy it asynchronously if that’s how you’re wired up.
If you’re attending the interactive portion of South by Southwest, I hope to see you there. Twitter me @daylife.
John Donovan
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That one of the UK’s leading dailies, the Guardian, plans to wholeheartedly embrace the potential of news content distribution through an API is an indication of a sea change in the news business. For too long, newspapers have resisted this strategy, instead believing that their URL is paramount; they wanted readers to come to their website in order to sell ads against those page views. If you look around the newsrooms, it’s pretty clear that that approach is not working.
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Join Ken tonight at The New York Semantic Web Meetup for a medium-depth dive into where the waters of the semantic web meet those of the news biz. Ken is tackling “Semantic Web Exploitation and Adoption in the Online News”.
In his own words: “I’ll be giving a 30-min talk on exploitation of semantic web resources, and adoption of standards in the news space. Daylife uses SemWeb resources heavily in certain areas, and we’d like to meetup with other provides and users of those resources. Since Daylife has a good perspective on the news industry (through working with a large number of media-biz clients), I’m also planning to review what various other companies are up to (aggregators and services like ourselves, and news outlets like Reuters and NYTimes).”
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