Webware

Martini Media, an advertising network that's aimed at affluent people, announced Wednesday that it has officially launched Martini Life, a site that targets high net-worth individuals through seven main channels: sailing, equestrian sports, private aviation, wine, classic cars, golfing, and cigars.

Martini Life aims at becoming the "go-to" destination for affluent individuals, but it won't create its own content. Instead, the site has pulled in more than 70 publishers and blogs to syndicate content to the site. For example, the site's sailing page features updates from the Mega Yacht News Blog and various other yachting-related sites across the Web.

Martini Media has also signed up Paramount and Sony as advertisers, along with more specialized companies like Giotto's Aircraft and OCSC Sailing.

Martini Life is generally designed well and finding stories about a particular interest was made simple thanks to its attractive homepage. Ironically, the site reminds me of news aggregator Alltop, in the sense that some of the best sources are at the user's disposal. But it should be noted that Martini Life provides a far more user-friendly interface than Alltop. Each story in the channels includes a "Vote" button to allow users to decide which stories were relevant and worth reading and those that were not. So far, there's little activity on the site and voting is practically non-existent, but it should be interesting to see if Martini uses the voting mechanism to change content partnerships over time.

The worst element of the entire site is the navigation bar at the bottom of the page. Instead of providing a well-designed navigation menu at the top of the page, Martini instead decided to place it at the bottom as a ridiculously large strip featuring links to other channels and an extremely large advertisement. It takes away from an otherwise attractive design.

Although the site is in its infant stages and the company needs to work some design kinks out, the Martini Media's CEO said that it will be expanding Martini Life in the next few months to add more "leisure pursuits" targeted to affluent people.

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.

In the category of yet-another-news-tracker, Newsflashr.com added search engine to its news aggregation service, which was launched in February this year. It searches across feeds from popular news-oriented sites, such as Yahoo News, Google News, Digg, MSNBC and even Twitter, delivering results by source.

Newsflashr.com doesn't offer filtering mechanisms, except ranking sites via Alexa, which is an unrefined indication of popularity rather than relevance to the search result. "Our approach is to leave it to the user to compare between the services," said Gal Arav, founder of Newsflashr.com.

Newsflashr.com also lets users search by popular topic, via a tag cloud, and sort the results by time or Alexa rank. For technology topics, Newsflashr.com provides an option to use the Techmeme Leaderboard as a set of feeds. Users can also adjust the freshness of feeds, aged from one to seven hours.

For news junkies, Newsflashr.com is a fast and convenient site for scanning headlines, but it needs a better way than Alexa to rank the popularity of the feed sources in search results. In addition, Arav's company developed Instant Bull, which provides search results for company tickers across stock message boards.

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.

DailyMe is a customizable news aggregator with a neat twist--it can be set up to automatically print up the day's news at a selected time each morning, emulating some of the experience of having a newspaper delivered to your door.

The service lets you pick all the topics you're interested in and will group them together on a single page that's updated throughout the day. There are broad topics to choose from, and each one has its own menu of subtopics in case you want to hone your feed. There's also an option to call out keywords you want to track, which can help narrow a wide topic such as technology or sports.

Users can pick what kind of topics they're interested in to shape the news that comes in. Even terrorism.

Besides keywords, advanced users can fine tune the topics by the source. Sources are listed in a directory and with a specific grouping of feeds. In that sense DailyMe becomes more of an intelligent RSS reader, as you can pick the news sites or blogs where you want your stream of information coming from.

DailyMe provides several ways to ingest your news. As mentioned above, using a small desktop application DailyMe will phone home at whatever time you select and automatically print out the latest news from those topics. You can also set up multiple alerts per day if you feel like filling up your e-mail in-box with news feeds.

I found the actual reading experience to be somewhat bland. The news is spread out over several pages instead of being in one place like other news aggregation services. It's not a deal killer, but I found it to be too much work to browse through each category. I think a lot of people who are used to getting a ton of stories on a single page on major newspaper sites or news portals will feel a little out of their element.

The one nice thing is that the stories are all hosted on the DailyMe site, meaning you're not just on a portal page that's going to jump you off. There's also an integrated commenting system that's separate from the original site, as well as a one- to five-star rating system that helps track what's hot on the site. At the moment DailyMe doesn't seem to be taking advantage of these ratings or comments, as they're disjointed from the rest of the content.

Earlier today the company announced that Neil Budde, former vice president and editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Sports is its new president (see News.com story). Budde is also the same guy who helped create The Wall Street Journal Online--so I see big things from DailyMe in the coming months.

Other services that aggregate news based on your tastes include: Tiinker, FaveBot, Spotback, and LeapTag.

DailyMe grabs news from topics you're interested in. If you're feeling old school you can even download a desktop plug-in that prints out the news for you.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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."

Often, the companies that present at the NY Tech Meetup are in a fledgling pre-beta phase and haven't received a whole lot of buzz. But one of the featured New York start-ups at Tuesday night's January meetup has gotten a whole lot of coverage among tech blogs since it launched last week: Daylife, a news aggregator that comes up with creative ways to visualize the people, places, organizations, and events that shape today's headlines. You might recognize its technology from the NewsRanker feature on the popular news blog Huffington Post--Daylife is all about using cool graphs, charts, timelines, and connections to make current events something more than just words and photos. And it's automated. This could be just what the Internet needs.

Complaints about some popular sites dependent on user-generated content, namely news site Digg, has made me wonder if whether the user-generated route isn't always going to be the best one. Take the news, for example. The recent buzz about Digg has shown that a news aggregator where headlines are picked out Coliseum-style by the masses with a thumbs up or down--shockingly--might not always showcase the best or most honestly-picked news. Putting Digg and Daylife side by side, I wonder whether the collective masses of the Internet will decide that there are some niches of new media that might be better off powered by automation rather than by "people power."

Top stories appear as large graphics with headlines

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There are already plenty of automated news aggregators out there, most notably the impressively successful Google News. But Google News is, more or less, a collection of headlines. Daylife aims to go several steps farther. For example, when you're reading headlines on Daylife and you click on the name of someone notable--say, David Beckham--you'll be treated to a series of news headlines, a photo slideshow, a quotations section, connections to other news topics, and a timeline that shows how many news stories have mentioned Becks on each day of the past month. (You can even separate the graph into news stories versus blog entries!) News, in the Daylife sense, is something that's quantifiable and dynamic; it's all interconnected, and anywhere you click can bring you to a whole new set of headlines and pictures: at first glance, this is a perfect presentation of the news for today's media-heavy, information saturated world where anyone can be a journalist. And with automation, Daylife avoids the arguably oligarchic nature of Digg.

Besides, the news really is more complex than an up-and-down ranking.

But Daylife is far from perfect. I'm not a huge fan of the site's "cover," as pretty as the photographs on it may be. Aren't splash pages totally 1998? Take me to the content, please. Additionally, I can relate to some of the disappointment that TechCrunch's Michael Arrington expressed when he wrote up Daylife's launch last week. The site is indeed missing several features that are practically must-haves for any rich-media start-up these days: Arrington mentioned RSS feeds and the ability for users to post comments. Sure, I read somewhere that only two percent of Internet users actually use a feed reader, but RSS is pretty much a requirement for the geek elite who are often the first crowd to pull a start-up out of its nest. And as for comments, I'd at least like to see some way for users to contribute to the site. At the NY Tech Meetup presentation, we were all assured that there's plenty more on the way--yes, including widgets, so that you can share Daylife data on your blog.

So, as with so many sites featured on Webware, it's really too early to gauge Daylife's potential for success. But in my opinion, it has a niche to fill. User-generated news sites like Digg are a colorful alternative to the often dry nature of automated aggregators, but there's the strong potential that their content won't actually reflect what's going on in the world. Daylife could find its footing on the Web as an automated news site that's actually interesting.

We'll just have to stay tuned.