Tell me about Daylife...

Daylife is an intelligent content services platform that harvests and deeply analyzes high-quality Web-based news and information sources in real time.

Daylife clients work with our highly flexible, easy-to-use platform to complement their own editorial expertise by instantly creating new pages, sections, and sites with little or no staffing.

Our clients tell us they've reduced their costs, increased their revenues, and made remarkable improvements in SEO and organic traffic acquisition as a result of using the Daylife Platform.

Why is Daylife novel - what makes it unique?

The Daylife Platform is a lot of rocket science and more than a little art, and is increasingly becoming foundational to the future of online publishing.

Daylife has cracked a number of pretty tough nuts, in that we have:

• Identified thousands of high-quality producers of news and information across the Web, and we're adding more all the time.
• The Daylife Platform is at work every minute of every day harvesting these sources as they publish new material, largely via RSS.
• As news and information flows into the Daylife Platform, it automatically runs dozens of analyses so we understand a huge range about the data we collect, things like: content type (article, blog post, photo, video); lead quote in a story and its attribution; key aspects of a story (such as products, personalities, politicians, and places); and how the subject matter relates to adjacent subject matter.

Because of this exquisite analytics capability, the news and information we collect can be used as originally published (pointing, of course, to the owner of the content) or brought to light in an almost infinite number of ways: as data, as timelines, as graphics and photo montages, as related to adjacent material, and so on.

It is this capability that enables publishers of every size to then use our curatorial and creation tools to slice and dice our data to create new destinations filled with fresh, always updating content to meet a whole variety of business objectives.

Isn't Daylife.com just a news Website?

Most people first start learning about the potential of Daylife on our Website, daylife.com, which is completely powered by the Daylife Platform.

While daylife.com definitely has the utility and entertainment value of a leading news and information site - in fact, we welcome more than 3 million unique visitors every month - we originally built the site as a showcase of the power, flexibility, potential, and beauty of the Daylife Platform.

What's important to note here is that our website requires the sustained attention of about one-and-a-half people each week, and is growing at a rate of 20% month-over-month with no investment in marketing. So, yes, daylife.com is just a website. And darned good one, too. But most importantly, it's a compelling testimony to the capability and impact of the Daylife Platform.

How is Daylife different from Google News, for instance?

At Daylife, we don't stop at simply collecting the world's news and information. Because we limit our sources to producers of high-quality content, we keep the fidelity of our output extraordinarily high while applying our patented filtering and analysis technologies to deeply understand the news across many dimensions, all in real time.

The result is what we view as an endlessly connected, infinitely browseable, ever-expanding 360-degree landscape. (It's kind of heady stuff!)

Publishers of all sizes use our Daylife Platform for "no-staff", instant-on production of fresh inventory, providing their users with updated, relevant, and contextual content that complements the publishers' own editorial expertise.

The Daylife Platform includes a range of pre-formatted modules - all beautifully designed - that publishers can use to custom-build pages, enabling them to match the look and feel of their sites. Our Daylife Platform APIs also enable a full range of output that is only limited by the imagination and creativity of our clients, developers, and users.

And because there is an ecosystem of developers creating new features based on the Daylife Platform API, we are able to offer our clients (via our Application Store) a range of easily integrated applications beyond those developed by our team.

Google, Yahoo!, and others simply lay the news out on the table, often without context or dimension or any type of magazine-style beauty. On search engines, you search. Using the Daylife Platform, a site's users browse - flipping page after page of interesting, engaging, gorgeously presented, timely news and information.

Can you tell me more about Daylife technology?

The technology behind the Daylife Platform really is rocket science. Just as Amazon's Web Services or Google's App Engine are cloud computers,Daylife's heart is an intelligent content cloud computer. This is essentially a database that draws from thousands of quality sources that exist in "the cloud"; filters, analyzes, and parses that data across multiple dimensions; and then enables the extraction of the data in a huge variety of ways.

Daylife has cracked a number of pretty tough nuts in that we have:

• Identified and continue to grow the tens of thousands of sources of high-quality producers of news and information across the Web.
• Our intelligent content platform is at work every minute of every day harvesting these sources as they publish new material.
• As news and information flows into the Daylife Platform, it automatically runs dozens and dozens of analyses so we understand a huge range about the data we collect, things like: content type (publication, blog post, photo, video); lead quote in a story and its attribution; key aspects of a story (such as products, personalities, politicians and places); and how it is the information subject matter relates to adjacent subject matter.
• Because of this exquisite analytical capability, the news and information we collect can be used as originally published (pointing, of course, to the owner of the content) or brought to light in an almost infinite number of ways: as data, as timelines, as graphics and photo montages, as related to adjacent material, and so on.
• It is this capability that enables publishers of every size to then use our curatorial and creation tools to slice-and-dice our data in ways that result in new destinations filled with fresh, always updating content to meet a whole variety of business objectives.

How does this differ from a search engine?

Most simply stated, search engines do keyword indexing and deliver many pages of search results.

The Daylife intelligent content services platform does this and literally dozens of other things, enabling a true browsing experience - either free-form or intentional - just like you might with a favorite magazine.

In other words: think of Google as a library card catalog and Daylife as a big urban newsstand.

How does the Daylife Select Work?

Using a simple, intuitive point-and-click interface, publishers act as curators to build smart content portals that become gateways to thousands or even millions of pages of fresh, always updating, and top quality news, photos, and other content from thousands of the best sites on the Web. Daylife Select complements the unique and proprietary editorial content of each particular publisher without additional headcount.

What sort of content is available to me to curate from?

In addition to selecting specific categories and then targeted topics within those categories, publishers can choose the types of media with which to compose a nearly endless number of new pages. Photo galleries, pull quotes, data graphics, news headlines and associated snippets, and supporting or related information. Daylife Select also makes it possible to integrate a full range of social media, including Twitter streams (by topic, for instance), YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Disqus comments, and Wikipedia entries. You can also add Yahoo! search content, Google gadgets, or design your own custom modules.

I don't really have Web development resources available - will I really be able to use this myself?

Yes. Daylife Select provides a full range of publishing tools, from easy interfaces for novice or resource-constrained clients to more complex tools that enable you to play directly with the CSS. Publishing your smart content portal's output to your website can be as simple, intuitive, and efficient as you would like.

What if I need support?

We're here to help - contact us right away:

What need in the marketplace do you fill?

Daylife is defining a new space in the world of online publishing: intelligent content services.

Daylife's intelligent content services platform changes the game of news and information delivery because we enable both the supply and demand for it in new, more efficient ways - ways that require little or no staffing to get at meaningful, measurable business results.

The demand for news and information on the Web continues to increase while the established models of creation, publishing, distribution, and consumption struggle to adapt to a new, fast-changing economy.

Distribution, in particular, relies heavily on a complex range of search algorithms, link ecosystems, and click activity - all of which is driven by user demand and behaviors.

The Daylife Platform offers a compelling solution for new, increasingly profitable paradigms on all four fronts: content creation, publication, distribution, and consumption.

So where does Daylife fit into the larger Web economy?

We are increasingly central to the news and information ecosystem, which is comprised of publishers, content creators and consumers, and have built a wholly unique way for each component to serve and be served by the other.

Where, exactly, does your "high-quality" content come from?

We index thousands of producers of quality content - from traditional publishers of news and information, to blogs and journals, and much more. By focusing on quality, we keep the fidelity of our content output very high.

Daylife also works with the wire image services (Reuters, Getty, the Associated Press) to deliver relevant, contextual, and beautiful photography.

Upon request, we also work with our partners to accept continuous feeds directly from their newsrooms so we can then feed it back to them through our filtering and analytics technologies. This enables them to use their own content in new, unique, creative ways, simply and easily. (We call this service Enterprise API - you can learn more about it below.)

How do you deal with content from paid subscription sites?

We're not able to include sources that charge for their content. Luckily for us, the numbers of producers who erect barriers to their content are fast dwindling, so this is not really a problem for us.

How do you decide who is a source and who isn't?

Our source listing has been built over a number of years and continues to grow daily. Many of our sources come from the recommendations of users, clients, and content creators who want to help grow Daylife.

Anyone can recommend a source to Daylife for inclusion in our aggregation engine. We have only a few firm rules regarding new content sources:

• Sources should be quality producers of news, information, or commentary;
• Have an established audience of some substance; and
• Have a record of uptime, regularly publishing, and avoiding systemic errors in their service.

If you know a source that fits this bill and isn't already in our service (please take a moment to search our site to find out), .

Can publishers decide to exclude Daylife sources they don't want or like?

Yes - absolutely. We've built choice into the Daylife Platform, which is highly flexible and very easy to use.

Publishers act as curators to decide what sources, filters, and analytics they want to employ to get at the substance of their new pages, sections, and sites. Daylife remembers these curatorial choices and refreshes these destinations as new content becomes available from the chosen sources.

As a publisher, you have access to all the knobs and dials that make the Daylife Platform magic happen. Publishers can choose exactly how to present information using our menu of presentation modules, or by selecting modules from our third-party developer application store, or by using the Daylife Platform API to build something unique on their own.

So, are you totally unbiased? Do you have editors or an editorial point of view?

The Daylife Platform is completely unbiased and responds only to the curatorial choices of its users. Publishers use our Daylife Platform to tailor the output according to the editorial style, standards, and points of view unique to their organizations.

On daylife.com, only our homepage covers have any editorial influence and we do our best to be balanced and unbiased in creating our covers each day.

Aren't there copyright issues? How do you get around those?

We use the now well-established Google guideline for most of the sources we aggregate, which has as a central tenet the practice of showing headlines and snippets, with links to the original source to get the full story. We do have established partnerships with AP, AFP, Reuters and Getty, and have full permission to use their material.

And we encourage original producers of content to brand it with favicons via their feeds, which we proudly display.

We believe in and support original authorship, and one of our principal objectives to highlight and drive traffic to creators.

How does Daylife's Enterprise API work? 

The Daylife Platform already enables A-list brands such as USA Today, NBC, Guardian, Telegraph, Sky, TNT and the Washington Post to marry their own content with the best of the rest of the Web. Enterprise API uses the same high-powered platform to collect, analyze and then deliver dynamic access to your own content, alone. With Daylife's Enterprise API, you can have your own white-labeled, branded API, focusing just on YOUR content, in a matter of days.

What is an API? 

Short for Application Programming Interface, an API is a way for developers to write web pages that can automatically “talk” to your catalog of content and ask it questions like, “What recent photos do you have of David Beckham?”

Why would I want an API? 

With an API, your own developers can build new features, faster, for use on your own site or across your network of sites. For example, the Washington Post uses their exclusive Daylife Platform Enterprise API to feed us their catalog of images for analysis and parsing, and then accesses that new trove of data via the same API. By deploying a private API with Daylife, the Washington Post was able to automatically create beautiful and dynamic galleries like this one quickly and easily, generating new pages of targeted ad inventory to boot.

Once you've deployed an API, you can choose to make it publicly accessible so other people can enhance their websites with pages and widgets that feature your content, showcasing your brand, linking to your web pages, and driving you traffic. For example, this page on the Guardian (UK) links to other news providers on the web, drawing in the most relevant content.

I already have RSS. Do I need an API? 

RSS is a great way to let readers follow along with the articles you publish day to day. By contrast, an API lets users ask specific questions about your content, and get back answers that they can use to build new applications that point back to your web pages.

For instance, using an API, a user can build a widget showing recent quotes by Sarah Palin from within your publication, or a slideshow of your images from the Vice Presidential debates.

By deploying an API, you unlock your content, for your internal team, your readers, and (if you so choose) developers around the world.

Who's using Daylife now?

On daylife.com, we have more than 3 million unique visitors and are growing 20% month-over-month.

Enterprise publishers using the Daylife Platform include:

• USA Today
• The Washington Post / Newsweek
• The Telegraph (U.K.)
• The Guardian (U.K.)
• CNN
• The Star-Ledger

Enterprise broadcasters using the Daylife Platform include:

• Turner
• Sky News (U.K., E.U., Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong)

Bloggers and independent producers using the Daylife Platform include:

• Davos Conversation / The World Economic Forum
• Mydeco
• The Earth Community Project
• The Communication Initiative
• TreeHugger
• Quotations Book

Brands using the Daylife Platform include:

• Purina
• Kellogg's
• Peterman's Eye

Tool/Developer sites using Daylife include:

• Zemanta
• Snaptalent