DailyMe site review

DailyMe is another new news site I thought I would chime in on.  Wow, these are coming up like weeds.  

They serve up syndicated content, and add some tools to customize article selection and delivery.  I would put them in the same category as Newsvine, although that company is more community-oriented.  In the business there are those of us that display content, and those of us just show excerpts and link to it.  Daylife is in the latter category when it comes to articles, but in the former when it comes to images.  

DailyMe has a very nice interface for customizing article selection.  They’ve broken the news into a few dozen categories, organized in a heirarchy two levels deep, and you can pull from any level in the heirarchy with the option of adding keywords.  Its one of the best ways of doing this that I’ve seen.  Not hard to do on the backend, I won’t even bother discussing, the site is mostly about the UI and not data analysis.  The meme-it feature, that allows you to indicate whether the article is insightful/enlightening/tragic/weird/humorous/uplifting.  Kind of lame.  Those are not among the bag of adjectives I select when describing news articles, but then my vocabulary is notoriously skewed towards the negative.  But they’re trying something new.  The feature is already there, I would give it a month or two, then cut it if it doesn’t get much usage (and I doubt it will).  Whether or not the nice content selection interface is enough, I’m not sure.  Its only a marginal improvement on what’s out there now, and marginal improvements sometimes aren’t enough to overcome adoption barriers when others are already established in the marketplace. 

What’s more interesting is their Publisher Services, which they’ll be demonstrating at ONA08.  That’s more of an open market than attracting viewers.  From their description, “licensing the same technology and content”, seems like white-labeling their site with the ability to add your own.  Perhaps a good play towards small news outlets, like your hometown rag or radio station, that want to display full articles.  Its better than building a third-rate portal.  So they’re a somewhat different market than Daylife, although there is a small amount of overlap.  When I learn more, I’ll post it.  I wish however this whole syndication model would go away, and publishers would put up their own articles and link to others when they need to.  But I’ll let more competent folk rant about that.