Daylife has finally hit the web, and it is pretty cool so far.
This is how you do a 'zine Hosted on Zooomr
From what I can see, this is the most usable news site I have seen. Like a magazine, they have a cover with big, pretty images and headlines, and like a good interactive experience, you can jump straight to that story. Also, once you get there, you are showed lots of good related content, also with photos!! Then, they provide... location-based stories! Magic!
The location page is packed with goodies, like stories from the past week, a month or so ago, and beyond. There are also the ever-present images from Getty along with captions slideshowing past, quotes, and testimonials relating to that geographic area. To the left is Florida.
There are bound to be a few things about a brand new site that the critics will not like, and I can't say I disagree with Mike Arrington (who invested in this project some time ago). Apparently lots of A-listers have some money/ consulting sunk in this site, but Mike doesn't mind coming out and stating some shortcomings.
From Techcrunch Jan 04, 2007:
What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what�s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, even for your bookmarked stuff. Even worse, there�s no ability for users to leave comments on articles, a feature that has been wildly successful at NewsVine and Topix. And the fact that the front page news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.
This quote also serves the added duty of comparing Daylife to the other top news sites on the web. Mike says Google News is still the king of aggregated news stories, and I must say I agree with him. Actually, I think Techmeme (see their tracking of Daylife posts) qualifies as a competitor, though the "tech" in the title suggests a different audience, I suppose.
I really hope these guys get a clue and start including audio and video services, along with the related stories and etc. If someone could start semantically linking podcasts, audio and video through speech-recognition, it would be quite a bit easier to steer people (or spam them). Maybe that's a mashup idea in the works... anybody game?
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