Daylife, a news aggregation start-up that runs a pretty Web site but makes its money from licensing its software to clients, has launched a new product: Daylife Select. It's a tool for Web sites and online publications to add aggregated news and multimedia content (like YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and Flickr images) from Daylife without requiring technical expertise.
With a point-and-click interface, participants can insert and place widgets, customize the theme, and even import the CSS design from their own sites. Access to Daylife Select comes along with a subscription to the company's API, which ranges from $10,000 to $30,000 per month.
The release of the product is more or less perfectly timed for news outlets that may be cutting costs in the light of the economic downturn--including laying off writers and editors. A cheaper and easier way to install an aggregate news page could be an option for small publications that have been feeling the pain.
"We're kind of a solution for publishers who are short on head count," founder and CEO Upendra Shardanand said to CNET News, adding that Daylife has been riding high on tighter budgets: the company said it reached halfway to its fourth-quarter projections two weeks into October.
The top headlines at a given time on Wednesday morning at OurSignal. Yeah, a bit short on relevant news.
(Credit: OurSignal)On Wednesday morning, I read about a new site called OurSignal, which mashes up the top headlines from Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and HackerNews, promising to show a more diverse array of what the Web's recommending. Kind of like OriginalSignal for social news.
Unfortunately, when I loaded up OurSignal, staring me in the face was "Goatse In Spore," a reference to an extremely crude graphical Web meme (don't Google it, please). Not exactly the kind of top headline I was looking for.
The concept is kind of cool: "warm" colors mean a story is gaining momentum, and "cool" colors mean it's fading. Bigger boxes mean more votes on a story across the Web. And it refreshes every 15 minutes, which isn't that impressive in the real-time culture of Summize, but is still quick enough to provide a fresh take on the news.
That's the problem: news. Social-news sites, for better or for worse, have become known for being places to find the most popular Top 10 lists and funny videos in addition to the news, and OurSignal is no exception. So if you're looking to find the goofiest Digg and Reddit headlines in one place, this is a nice resource; but if you're actually looking for the news, you might be out of luck. Putting a handful of social-news sites together unfortunately doesn't do much to help the content.
I'll stick to Google News for now, thanks.
The Huffington Post, the news aggregation and commentary site founded by political pundit Arianna Huffington and former AOL exec Ken Lerer, is finally jumping on the post-Al-Gore bandwagon.
The company announced Wednesday that it will be launching HuffPost Green, a site division specific to "green" content through a content partnership with Discovery Communications' Planet Green channel as well as TreeHugger, the popular eco-news blog that Discovery acquired last year.
If you're like me, your reaction to this news might've been, "What? You mean there isn't a 'green' section already?" The New York-based Huffington Post got its start as a liberal answer to the wildly popular Drudge Report news site, and while it's since branched beyond its political roots, it remains targeted toward a well-educated, left-leaning audience.
But although it runs sections pertaining to politics, media, entertainment, business, and "living," as well as a comedy site called 23/6 in conjunction with IAC, there still hadn't been a section devoted to the unavoidably trendy niche of environmental media. Until now.
"HuffPost Green will focus on eco news and trends--from style and eco-conscious celebrities to green lifestyle tips and the latest scientific findings and expert analysis," a release from the company explained, hinting that we will likely see photos of Leonardo DiCaprio with his shirt off in addition to the latest grim findings on climate change. "The section will also feature advice on sustainable investing and highlight eco-friendly businesses and sustainable business sectors such as renewable energy, green building, recycling and organics."
The new section of the site is set to launch June 4. Huffington Post representatives said the effort was spearheaded by current Editor-at-large Willow Bay, a TV journalist who currently hosts programs on the Lifetime women's cable network.
What's the hottest way to save face in today's eco-conscious, Jolie-Pitt-and-Project-Red world? Donate to charity, of course.
The Huffington Post, the online news outlet founded in 2005 by pundit Arianna Huffington and AOL veteran Ken Lerer, has managed to tick some people off because the site doesn't pay its army of bloggers. Since then, the company has attempted to justify that stance as accusations of greed and poor ethics (and of course the term "sweatshop") have been thrown rather liberally around the blogosphere.
"Think about the bloggers as op-ed page writers," Huffington said in an interview with Portfolio.com. "No one writes an op-ed for The New York Times for the money. They're writing because they want their views out there."
Problem is, the op-ed page of the Times is just one sliver of the newspaper, whereas a huge portion of the Huffington Post's revenue comes from ads running on those unpaid bloggers' posts--as well as on aggregated content from other news outlets. The "unpaid bloggers as op-ed contributors" argument just doesn't float that well.
So what's a left-leaning new-media mogul to do?
"We are looking at a model which would allow contributions to be made to a blogger's favorite charities," Huffington explained in the Portfolio interview. That would consequently keep the payroll small but prevent the company from looking, well, greedy. "Our bloggers would choose a number of charities, and we're working out a revenue model which would allow money to be sent to those charities."
Oh, snap. Brangelina would be so proud.
News aggregation community Digg has announced a number of new features designed to take the site's social networking beyond simply "digging" and "burying" headlines and blog entries.
Starting Wednesday night, members of the site can further customize their account profiles so that they more closely resemble something on a social-networking site--more personal information, bigger photos, and a more extensive record of site activity. They will also be able to use their friends lists as content filters so that their "social news" comes from a select group rather than the Digg community as a whole.
That's not all. In a video posted on the Digg blog, founder Kevin Rose boasted that the site has launched more than 50 new features. Among them are "shout," so that users can send quick messages to people on their friends lists, and a "sharing" function much like Facebook's--or the link-sharing feature in Rose's other start-up, Pownce.
In addition, more new Digg features are on the calendar: in late October, the long-awaited "Digg Images" section, where people will be able to submit and vote on images rather than news stories, will launch. Later this year, the site will release a recommendations engine that sounds much like StumbleUpon, as well as a way for people to craft customized e-mail alerts.
By allowing individual Diggers to shape their identities--and their methods of news consumption--on the site, the company may be doing some image therapy, whether intended or unintended. Digg, touted upon its launch as a small media revolution, has become wildly popular (the company's statistics say 19.3 million unique visitors in August) but nevertheless has gained a reputation as being a geek hub--its audience is often compared to that of veteran "nerd news" sites like Slashdot and Fark.
Stories about the likes of Linux and HD DVD often dominate the front page, and if there's any kind of iPhone news, forget about finding much else in the top 10. But that could change with extensive customization features that will allow relative Luddites to block out the swarms of Apple and Google junkies, as well as more detailed profiles that highlight individual Digger identities rather than allowing the community to blend into an amorphous mass of vociferous tech newshounds.
And that might be exactly what Digg needs.
The company is certainly highlighting its desire to retool its reputation. "Digg has made great progress expanding beyond its roots in tech news: page views of content related to technology currently represent only 12 percent of all page views on Digg," the company said in a statement Wednesday. "This trend, which started about a year ago when nontech content submissions first outnumbered tech content submissions, continues to grow as the Digg user base becomes more diverse."
If you ask new-media pundit Jeff Jarvis, the humble hyperlink ought to be counted high in the ranks of digital-age phenomena that have transformed the face of news reporting and consumption.
"The hyperlink has changed everything," asserted Jarvis, who runs media criticism site BuzzMachine and political blog PrezVid. Citing the motto "do what you do best, and link to the rest," he said that news outlets can achieve new levels of efficiency through the ability to direct readers to click elsewhere for more information. In one sense, it's the 21st-century equivalent of a newspaper running an Associated Press or Reuters wire story instead of assigning one of its own reporters to the task. On the other hand, the hyperlink is the foundation behind a phenomenon that's purely Web 2.0: the news aggregator.
Read the rest of the CNET News.com story here.
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