January 4th, 2007
I Don’t Understand Or Have Much Reason To Trust Daylife’s News Judgment
The much anticipated news site Daylife has launched — there has been much critique and analysis, which I won’t repeat — most of it has focused on Daylife’s functionality (including a harsh critique from investor Mike Arrington). Instead, I’m going to take a look at the content. Here are the top 10 stories:
1. Dems Take Charge On Capitol Hill
2. Croc Hunter Death Video Given To Widow
3. Mystery Object Hits New Jersey Home
4. ‘Subway Superman’ in His Own Words
5. Somali militia group ’surrounded’
6. Controversial Treatment Keeps Disabled Child Small
7. Rumours of new Thai coup denied
8. Gerald Ford Laid To Rest
9. Ford’s body is laid to rest in hometown
10. Saddam Execution Video Leads to Arrests
I could make the case that stories 3, 4, and 5 aren’t nearly as important as, say, story 10, at least from a global news perspective (unless the NJ meteorite carries evidence of extraterrestrial life). That of course would beg the question — “important” by what measure? And that’s exactly what Daylife seems to be lacking in its beta version. There’s no context to understand the relative importance of these stories, no commentary to put them in perspective.
That’s one of the strengths of Gabe Rivera’s TechMeme (and his other memetrackers) — the number of other sites linking to a particular story helps explain the relative rankings and also offers immediate references for discussion and perspective (which was very helpful in learning about the launch of Daylife). Daylife segregates “news articles” from “blog posts,” a distinction that TechMeme has helped to render largely meaningless.
The bottom line is that TechMeme has given me reason to trust its news judgment — I have also gotten to know and trust many of the writers whose judgment (via linking) drives TechMeme. I see little reason out of the box to trust Daylife’s news judgment, which is partly a function of not understanding it.
Given that this is just a beta release, I won’t read much more into it, other than to agree with Liz Gannes and Heather Green that it’s not obvious how the beta maps to Daylife’s ideal and objectives. I also appreciated this wisdom from Rex Hammock:
When something announced takes over a year to launch and is so slick in appearance, it invites itself to be judged by what it lacks — moreso than by what it has.
Daylife is an instructive reminder of how important news judgment is — and how hard it is to earn trust — in the battle over information filtering online.
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[...] Bonus links: Two observations from really smart observers of this “space”: Scott Karp and David Weinberger. [...]
I have to agree.
And furthermore, I don’t really know *why* I’d use daylife for anything at all; there’s nothing it does better than anything else with the exception that it tracks “old” news pretty well. Search “Digg”, and you get a chronological listing of news — that’s something that you don’t get with Techmeme or Google News.
I love Techmeme like everyone else, but I’d love it even MORE (gabe, are you watching?) if there was some way of searching the archives in a meaningful way.
Cheers
t @ dji
[...] Publishing 2.0: I Don’t Understand Or Have Much Reason To Trust Daylife’s News Judgment Scott Karp says Daylife seems to be lacking “context to understand the relative importance of these stories, no commentary to put them in perspective”. (tags: daylife journalism judgment trust) [...]
[...] To much ado, Daylife has has officially moved into the news aggregation market. (See Michael Arrington’s critique). One thing Daylife has is cache given its investors include Arrington, Craig Newmark and Jeff Jarvis but I do wonder about its ability to differentiate itself from Topix, Newsvine, Google News, Tailrank, etc. I spent some time on Daylife yesterday, and it has some interesting features that hint at its potential. In particular, I like how photographs and related links are displayed, and how you can “train” Daylife to aggregate the news you want to see by using its “My World” feature. One thing I do wonder about is where Daylife gets its news - something Scott Karp also questions. I did a bunch of searches and, to be honest, the results were, at best, average. To be fair, it is still early days. Jarvis promises a number of improvements will be forthcoming, including the implementation of RSS. Daylife’s launch got me thinking about how Gabe “Techmeme” Rivera plans to expand his news aggregation empire, which now covers technology, baseball, politics and gossip. Will Rivera move into other areas such as health or business, and will he bolster the amount of advertising on his sites? Note: For a more in-depth review on Daylife, check out ZDnet’s Dan Farber (an “unabashed Techmeme fan”), who describes Daylife as “listless” (ouch!). [...]
I would still use Techmeme. Hope to see some niche coverage on Dylife.
MediaVidea has a story on types of bloggers and the dangers associated with blogging.
http://mediavidea.blogspot.com/2007/01/two-basic-types-of-bloggers.html
[...] The twist is that Daylife is not totally automated news like Google News, but rather has real editors making real decisions about what is important. Jeff Jarvis blogged that the only thing those editors are contributing is that they decide what’s goes on the front page, the cover as it were. The cover is a large Flash graphic with an overlayed title that links to a story. If you don’t like that story, there is a scrolling bar under it with more images that link to notable stories from today and few days before. Personally, this does nothing for me and rather than giving me a big overview of the days news, it highlights a few stories that someone else thinks are important. If you don’t want to read them you have to go to the nav bar on top and move along. [...]
[...] Digg it | Track with co.mments | | Cosmos | Annotate this page Click here for copyright permissions! Copyright 2006 MathewIngram [...]
Scott,
Clearly, we could have made this clearer: The top news is the compilation of a number of top news sites’ judgment, not Daylife’s (as it says in one of the comments above, the only thing selected by people is the covers).
This is just one view of the news. We hope to have many more. For example, when the service gets a critical mass of users, then their behavior can yield another view.
jeff
I Don’t Understand Or Have Much Reason To Trust Daylife’s News Judgment
its discreet-bordering-on-secretive launch early stages, so it was bound to get a throrough once-over when it de-cloaked, but after Mike “Techcrunch” Arrington deemed himself “underwhelmed” well, that raised the stakes a little. It seems like a lot of the negative reviews stem from what I think is a misunderstanding of what people are really seeing when they look at Daylife. It’s more than a simple news aggregator (like Google News, TechMeme, or Megite
[...] On one of those points, I think we’re safe: the criticism, characterised best by Scott Karp, that Daylife’s editorial algorithm offers nothing new or trustworthy.Current providers in what has been called the News 2.0 sector have traditionally used one of three [...]