In the past few weeks news aggregator startup Daylife has started to work with digital publications, according to a report by paidContent.org, with new projects at Mashable and text message platform ChaCha launched yesterday.

According to paidContent.org Daylife will set up a topic library for Mashable to help organise its past stories and is also working on ‘visuals enhancement’ with ChaCha.

While Mashable didn’t need any lessons in news distribution, it did need help organising the amount of stories it’s accumulated since launching five years ago. Daylife set up a topic library to help better organise its coverage. The Daylife API gathers everything in real-time and integrates with Mashable’s existing advertising network…

In ChaCha’s case, Daylife is helping to give the site’s visuals greater enhancement. The additional photo choices come from Daylife’s year-old collaboration with Getty Images. The deal with Daylife follows ChaCha’s huge $20 million funding last week, as it looks to dominate the burgeoning mobile search market.

• Editor’s Weblog: Daylife – a solution to the ‘conundrum of profit vs content’?
• The New York Observer: Daylife, an aggregator newspapers like
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• #ds10: Ultraknowledge – search and visualising the news

Why does search have to produce the same set of results that we always get?

One of Andrew Lyons’, commercial director of Ultraknowledge (UKn), opening questions at the Digital Storytelling conference last week as he talked delegates through UKn’s work with the Independent.

The Independent’s NewsWall, launched in January, is a new way of organising stories and navigating through them. It provides a “visual documentation” of a topic and what’s happened in that subject area. (Similar efforts are being made by Daylife’s technology and the Guardian’s News Zeitgeist.

When searched, the wall will return 30 picture-led stories as results, and figures for dwell time on the wall are proving interesting, said Lyons.

The next part will be the ability to save my search for a topic to my Facebook page and then only have it update when it’s relevant to me.

UKn can now start to produce sponsored NewsWalls around events such as the forthcoming World Cup or general election. It will also be opening up the archive of content available through the Independent’s NewsWall from two years to the full 23 years of its history.

UKn has already worked with other publishers to create more intelligent and visually organised search results pages, such as those produced by an initial search on Metro.co.uk.

But the firm wants to take this a step further, by helping news organisations build topic pages for breaking news items by cleverly tagging and organising archived work, and through its latest – and yet-to-be launched project – StoryTriggers – a way to help journalists and news organisations find new leads and spot breaking news trends.

Sometimes the story that you’re after isn’t on your beat, so how do you find it. But when you’re dealing with news its changing, fast – how do you SEO for this? How do you tag it and relate it to what’s happened in the past and what’s happening in the future? (…) We want to be an innovation lab for publishers.

• paidContent.org: Daylife working with digital publications
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In his response to TechCrunch’s declaration that hand-crafted content on news and other websites is being replaced by “fast-food content”, Daylife CEO Upendra Shardanand says its the tools being used by writers and editors to create that content that are part of the problem:

The real problem is that storytellers are using the same authoring tool to write stories for the web that they use for print. A text editor. For those in print businesses, they are particularly handcuffed since they need the same tool to publish to two places – print and the web. So the tools force the authors to create “print” experiences online.

Full post at this link…

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The New York Observer’s Gillian Reagan takes a look at Daylife, a news aggregator in which news organisations are using and investing, rather than fighting.

“At Daylife, a digital media services start-up, founder and chief executive Upendra Shardanand and his team of young engineers have a name for a new breed of journalists: RoboCop editor.”

Full story at this link…

• Daylife targets online publishers with new multimedia service
• Upendra Shardanand: Hand-crafted content online needs new tools
• paidContent.org: Daylife working with digital publications
• Editor’s Weblog: Daylife – a solution to the ‘conundrum of profit vs content’?
• Press Gazette: Ian Smith quits as Reed Elsevier chief

Refining news alerts: The good folk at Daylife have created a way to receive Twitter news alerts refined by journalist name or a specified list of sources. You can also submit real time search queries using their handy guide. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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A look at whether Daylife could be the solution to the ‘conundrum of profit vs content’. This week sees the launch of Daylife Select, a tool that enables newspapers to enhance and expand their content easily and quickly.

• paidContent.org: Daylife working with digital publications
• Upendra Shardanand: Hand-crafted content online needs new tools
• Tool of the week for journalists: Data.gov.uk’s map-based search
• The New York Observer: Daylife, an aggregator newspapers like
• Australian National Library opens newspaper archive

The software engineering company behind Sky News’ recent online revamp, Daylife, has launched a new product aimed at online news publishers.

Sky used Daylife’s products to create topic pages of related multimedia content called ‘in depth’ pages.

The new Daylife Enterprise API will similarly let publishers re-purpose blog posts, text, data and audio-visual content in new ways online.

How does it do this? The service will collect this content and then create feeds which the publisher can put to use a variety of ways – as per their request.

For example – the Enterprise API was trialled by the Washington Post to create picture galleries from the Beijing Olympics – searchable by sport and country – and to accompany its US presidential campaign coverage.

Daylife took all the incoming photos from Post photographers around these subjects and made them available to the paper as an API, ready for use to create new pages on its website.

Utilising existing content in this way can be a success in terms of web traffic – making sites a more attractive prospect for advertisers, says Daylife CEO Upendra Shardanand.

As part of the product, publishers can make these content feeds open to the public and third-party developers – a feature which Shardanand hopes will lead to more collaboration on news content between publishers and users.

“In terms of e-commerce and advertising there’s been so much innovation in the last 10 years online, in comparison there’s not been so much in news,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

“How do you innovate if you don’t do software? I don’t know what the next best concept is but a service like ours can be shared.”

Publishers should not dismiss outsourcing this work, says Shardanand, after all it’s not their job and with the amount of content they have available would be extremely time consuming – the company has over 200 machines running to process the content. It’s not for free, but licences are decided on a customer-by-customer basis.

Instead, he told us, the aim is to get the most value out of the content that publishers are already producing for both online and other editions – such as the photos taken by WaPo staff – by doing the backend work for them.

Crucial to the success of the project will be the say that publishers have over what is done with their content – something which Shardanand is keenly aware of.

“These have to be content portals that are still customised and match your brand and voice,” he says.

“It wouldn’t work if the editors couldn’t do exactly what they want. Advertisers wouldn’t value it either.”

• Upendra Shardanand: Hand-crafted content online needs new tools
• The New York Observer: Daylife, an aggregator newspapers like
• paidContent.org: Daylife working with digital publications
• Editor’s Weblog: Daylife – a solution to the ‘conundrum of profit vs content’?
• #ds10: Ultraknowledge – search and visualising the news