Daylife.com - A New Spin in the News Aggregation Genre.
DayLife.com is an interesting new addition to a news aggregation site. Daylife consolidates news stories and information from multiple sources across the web and organizes it into a very clean and easy to use interface.
On top of being an online destination for news, one feature that sets this site apart from other sites in this field is their “daypi” (DayLife API) that allows publishers and site owners to include the sections and news stories directly on their site. However, since this blog is all about adding the search to your browser, the following paragraphs will focus primarily on the online interface and search capabilities.
The Interface
One of the big attractions of this site is it’s user interface, in particular the search results page.
Many news sites aggregation sites will simply list the news articles by order of relevance and/or recency. While DayLife does order their news stories by the same criteria, the format in which it’s presented is rather unique.
When you do a search for a topic say “olympics”, DayLife will present you with a results page split into five main sections:
- Topics
- Photos
- Articles
- Quotes
- Web Sites and Publications
Sections
Topics: The topics section is a little confusing to me, but it appears that they find alternative topics that also have a lot of information about your search query. For example, keeping on the Olympics search query, some of the topics include: NBC, Google, Michael Phelps, ESPN, and a few others.
Photos: The second section into the results page is for photos. Each of the photo’s listed on the main page have captions or title tags relevant to the search term. Once you Mouse-Over each of the photo’s, it brings up the caption to read and also links to see the next photo or visit the site itself
Articles: This is really the meat and potatoes of the application, it’s news stories. The format of the news stories is familiar… you have a title, an excerpt, it’s source, link to the original article as well as links to similar topics.
Quotes: The Quotes section is probably my favorite section of the whole application. The quotes are presented in a little quote box and also highlight the search term you looked for. (careful, this can be addicting.
Web Sites and Publications: Finally, there is the web sites and publications section. This lists the web sites that are found with the title or the domain name relating to your search term.
There are obviously far more pages once you start exploring the site, however there are too many to list in this short review.
A Brief intro to the API
A key factor that differentiates DayLife from other news aggregation sites out there is it’s API or “daypi”. This feature that allows publishers and web site owners to include anything from individual articles to entire sections of DayLife content onto their site. A few examples of sites that use this application are Newsweek, USA Today, TNT, and many more.
Like I mentioned earlier, this is a very powerful tool available to publishers, however it’s outside of the scope of this blog. If you have a need and the technical availability, I highly recommend you give it a shot.
The Verdict
DayLife.com is a relatively new player in a very crowded field. However, of all the news aggregation sites I’ve experienced, DayLife.com is by far the most intuitive and easy to use application I’ve seen to date.
