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So, go check out Daylife, go on… I’ll wait…

Back now? Ok, Daylife (in case you’re cheating and reading ahead) is a “news aggregator” — that means it is a service that, in their own words, “gathers and analyzes mind-boggling amounts of high-quality news and other content from across the web.” Then they package it up in ways that virtually anyone from users (that would be you when I told you to go look at their site) to web-head, code monkeys like me can use.

Now that right there is very cool in and of itself, but the truly over-the-top feature of Daylife is its ability to “chain” topics. Like Wikipedia, you can spend hours clicking through links on Daylife meandering from news topic to news topic (until, I imagine, you end up at Cargo Cults since every web search ends there).

But so what? Well, I got to start looking at Daylife for work. Now this is really interesting, because when I first heard of Daylife (probably via BuzzMachine) it was billed as a way for small web news sites or beat blogs to rival their bigger brethren in content so right away it was strange — being the bigger brethren and all.

We decided (meaning, “I was told to”) to look at Daylife in three areas (and yes I’m being intentionally vague here because we’re not done yet):

1. Pad out an existing strong section with related content from Daylife
2. Bolster a weaker section of our content with related content from Daylife
3. Build out a section that we think could ‘drive traffic’ where we had no existing content before

It’s that last one that was the most interesting to me because, simply put, I thought it was terrible idea. Padding out native sections with related news is one thing, I think that’s a great approach (especially when you can tailor the sources like you can with the Daylife API) and as a believer in the Ethic of the Link it all fits in nicely.

(Hmm, all that Link Ethic stuff is from BuzzMachine who’s proprietor, Jeff Jarvis, is a partner in Daylife… do you see a pattern here?)

But building out what amounts to a virtual section of your web site with no original content at all just feels like, well… cheating. Sure your ad folks can probably sell it (revenue!!!), but it none of that content is yours and I question anyone’s ability to drive sustainable traffic to a section that’s not a natural strength of the site in the first place. And then I can’t get past the whole “negative-sum” notion of it — if everyone simply linked to everyone else, would anyone have any original content? To me this breaks the ethic of the link in a big way.

All that all being said, I still elected to start with this so-called “virtual section” because, ironically, due to it’s very nature of not having any in-house content it would be the quickest and easiest to build. This way, my thinking went, I could wade into the Daylife API, play around a bit, build the section out, deploy it and then move on to the “real” sections with a better understanding of how Daylife works. That seems to have been a good approach so far. I still think the whole virtual-section idea is dodgy though ;).

On the tech side, Daylife has a pretty slick RESTful API (called the DayPI… get it? day-pee-eye?) where you can do generic searches or pull related articles and photos for a given article or photo which is all to be expected. What’s cool is you can pull related topics as well, which come with their own stories and photos (this is the basis for the “chaining” mentioned above). They have a number of libraries and code snippets available (of varying quality) to get you going and I played with a few of them to get a feel for what was doable.

Ultimately, since they offer a native JSON return format, I opted instead to write a simple proxy to their API so I could roll the whole thing up in AJAX calls (made extra simple thru jQuery). This also allowed me to cache the requests on the local side for a quick speed boost.

So we’ll see how the various sections do, I like the idea of Daylife and I like their approach to news. If it’s used correctly it can be, I think, a really nice add-on for most news websites.