Daylife: A Very Cool Web 2.0 News Aggregator

I discovered Daylife today when I got an automated News Alert from Google that Daylife had indexed Ft. Hard Knox. Having no idea what that meant, I naturally wanted to check it out, and I’m glad I did, because Daylife is my new daily news aggregator…at least for now. A little over a year old, and still in “beta” stage, Daylife is an up-and-coming Web 2.0 aggregator that is doing a lot right.

On its “about” page, Daylife explains it is:

A new way to explore the world…Daylife is a news site and distribution platform that organizes the world’s news into a rich landscape of related stories and images of every size and perspective.

Designed to enable new ways to present and explore the world of news, Daylife gathers news from thousands of sources worldwide for you to:

• Discover news and related perspectives from across the world
• Explore connections between stories and topics
• Dive into stories from photos and quotes in the news
• Track the coverage of virtually any topic

Of course, much of the available news is from mainstream print media, so the front has the same decidedly liberal slant as the other major online social news services and news aggregators. However, the format and user-friendliness is unique to Daylife, and alternate points of view (i.e. “politically conservative”) are there if you look for them. Here are a couple of examples of searches I did:

Duncan Hunter

Drew Edmondson

For each search there are:

• Related Topics
• Photos
• Articles (from a variety of sources including internet media, print media, blogs, etc..)
• Quotes from that person or on that topic
• Publications containing that search term

Daylife also has a service for Developers and Publishers. So far, the examples they are showing off are on the far left of the web – the Huffington Post, Tree Huggers, etc.., but their FAQ page states:

The news on Daylife comes from thousands of highly diverse publications, each of which may have its own political, ethical, and other positions. Daylife itself does not endorse any editorial position over any other one. We present the news as it’s published by the sources in our system.

The only way we’ll know how true this is will be to give them a shot. There is a section in the lower right-hand corner of the site to “suggest a publication for us to index.” Some of my favorites were already showing up on their index, and I’ve already submitten a few others…hopefully they’ll be on there soon.

A couple of things I’d like to see on Daylife:

• RSS feeds on each page…Google has spoiled me with that feature, and I’d like to see it here, too.
• A Facebook integration, similar to the ones for Stumbleupon and del.icio.us.

…and, of course, more right-leaning news sources. Then, it would be PERFECT.