The long-awaited news aggregation site Daylife has arrived. It's a fully automated news aggregator that pulls in text articles, photo and video from news sources and blogs all over the web. Most everything on the site is dynamic and automatically generated, but a team of editors puts together the site's homepage. It's sort of an extension of what Newsvine is doing, or maybe Buzzfeed with less editorial and more automated aggregation.
The site's homepage is visually impressive. The day's most important hand-picked stories are displayed in a very slick-looking deck of "covers" that superimpose a headline on top of a wire photo.
Click through and you'll see the news articles relating to the meme, complete with pull quotes, photos and stats. Photos are given the Ken Burns slideshow treatment – a nice touch.
You can run searches for stories and media, as one would expect. One thing I really like is that cross-referenced topics are stacked next to whatever you've searched for. To see an example of this, check out the topic page for Barry Zito. Look at the left side of the page and you'll see related people (Scott Boras, Mike Scioscia, Barry Bonds) and places (San Francisco, Oakland). Check out other dynamic topic pages for Sacha Baron Cohen and the World Bank.
Some cons: Daylife is really slow. Maybe it's because of all the traffic, who knows. Also, where's the RSS? And how do readers comment on stories? TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, a Daylife investor, noticed this as well and was not pleased. Check out his review.
Buzz Machine's Jeff Jarvis is involved in the project. As he notes today on his blog: "It's a start ??? a beta ??? with much more to come."
