Daylife breaks but investor not happy

Daylife has launched aiming to be the news aggregator to create clarity from the fog and chaos of the world's online news.

The list of backers of Daylife reads like the great and the good of online journalism: Craig Newmark, the NY Times, Mike Arrington, Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis are all involved in the project.

The site claim its intention is to create 'better news' more able to serve the public and make a more healthy news industry. Yet not all are happy.

In his blog post about the launch, Mike Arrington of Techcrunch wrote: "After quickly reviewing the launch product, I am unhappy to report that I am underwhelmed by what Daylife has to offer.

"Perhaps I am conflicted because I am close to the company, but in my opinion Daylife has failed to raise the bar and will not be a compelling offering for news junkies."

The beta version site looks like a versatile version of Google news, combining Web 2.0 offerings with tools that allow more oblique searches around a piece of information.

The site design also makes it look more like a newspaper website than other aggregation sites like Techmeme and Topix. Yet it lacks several of the features common to those sites such as RSS and the ability to leave comments . It is, however, believed that RSS is in the pipeline.

The home page lists news in traditional categories of world, business, celebrity, politics, technology, science and sports - each undated by the minute - and listing sub-topics: news, people, organisations and places.

If you enter the search term 'David Beckham' the site returns a tabbed homepage with the latest news on the topic - called The Wire - as well as the past 24 hours', week's and month's news.

In addition you get a listing of people mentioned in the same context and a photo gallery of Mr Beckham.

Each tab enables you to get a more specific look at these topics in the same way as it does from the site's home page.

A 30-day timeline charting the frequency of mentions in news and blog posts also allows users to zoom into a particular day and chart from when and where the news about 'Goldenballs' came.

The site also has a 'My Word' feature that allows users to personalise their news through tagging certain topics.

Mr Arrington added: "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."

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