Upendra Shardanand

I’m pretty lucky. I love the team here at Daylife – such a crazy concentration of talent and creativity (and a few quirks), no-nonsense, super thoughtful, and an endless source of amusement. And for the past few months they’ve been hard at work in the lab busting out our latest service, which launches today. (Hot off the heels of our Enterprise API product which launched a couple weeks ago!)

Introducing the latest addition to the Daylife Platform, one that I think will be a game-changer for online publishing: the mind-bending Daylife Select.

As you know, we have a large and growing client base that uses the Daylife Platform (the Daylife API and Daylife Enterprise API) to build gorgeous new pages of constantly updating content, typically around a vast range of topics. But we kept hearing from publishers that their developer resources are limited or diminishing, and that they needed more of an “instant-on” solution.

Daylife Select lets publishers launch instant content portals containing thousands or millions of pages, with stories, topics, photo galleries, search (much like you see on our showcase, daylife.com), all in their own brand, voice, look, and feel.  And without developer resources.  It all happens through a simple point-and-click interface, not unlike launching a social network on Ning or a blog on WordPress.

Except this is an instant content portal (note: with high-fidelity CONTENT). You can manage the templates, pick the modules you want, change the parameters, change the layout, CSS – and lo, instant site. And through our integration tools, it can blend seamlessly with (or around) your existing property.

Since our intelligent content services platform collects and then deeply analyzes news, information, and graphics from high-quality sources as it is published to the Web, our publishers are able to tap into this vast database (think of it as a content cloud computer, not to abuse the trendy phrase) to build out their smart content portals. The result is that our publishers can add all sorts of content to their sites – again, without the need for developer resources – including:

• Photo galleries and rich data graphics
• Hundreds of thousands of topic pages
• News headlines and associated snippets; and
• Graphical pull quotes and supporting or related information
• And of course, search

Wait, there’s more. Daylife Select supports not only Daylife-collected content, but a huge range social media sources to their sites. Working through their smart content portals, they can choose to add videos from YouTube, photos from Flickr, topical streams from Twitter, search results from Yahoo!, comments from Disqus, and entries from Wikipedia.

Oh, and you can also add ANY Google Gadget. Or design your own custom module.

Further – once you’ve customized your portal – not only do you have millions of pages – but every piece of every page is embeddable and shareable – so you now have millions of widgets as well. Bam!

Finally, a capability we’ve had for awhile is now available for our clients using either the Daylife API or Daylife Select: Smart Context. Smart Context automatically inserts hyperlinks into topical keywords inside the text; these link to Daylife-powered topic pages. This capability can be extended to your proprietary content or to any of the third-party content we make available on your sites. Daylife topics pages provide a fulsome, 360-degree view that helps you readers deeply understand the news and information they’re presented with. Our topics pages also enable you to increase your URLs exponentially, which have huge downstream impacts on SEO and, of course, organic traffic acquisition.

As publishers come under increasing pressure to reduce operating costs, focus their enterprise reporting and increase revenues, the full range of services available to them from our Daylife Platform provides a very real solution to these challenges. It let’s you curate the world around your content – do what you do best and outsource the rest. The economics of publishing both on and offline have changed radically over the last five years, and as replacement economics come into play, we’re see Daylife become a central utility within that new reality.

Fun!

I gave a lightning presentation at (the most excellent) CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s New Business Models for News Summit. A riff pulling from my prior blog posts. Slides and notes below.

In the not-too-distant future, every site will be a news publisher. Every site is about something, and will publish news about their topic of interest.

It may sound far-fetched, but if 10 years ago you were told that every site would run ads, that would have sounded pretty crazy. But Google automated the process and made it so easy and so efficient to run ads that, sure enough, every site has an ad unit somewhere.

So if, in the not-too-distant future, it were as easy as AdSense to add content to one’s site, a lot more sites will be adding fresh content about whatever their area of interest may be. And maybe that future isn’t so distant…

Purina is a company that makes cat and dog food. They’ve also launched a news portal for pet lovers, with news, photos, and videos. Using an editor + Daylife. Again, this is a cat and dog food company.

In a world where you have thousands of news publishers all of a sudden, who wins?

Well, one thing hasn’t changed. To quote my friend Chris Willis, “navigation and convenience are the new pipes.” Offline, controlling distribution meant owning paper, printing presses, and trucks. Or broadcast towers. Or thousands of miles of cable. Online, it’s about who offers the best navigation and convenience. Google is the most convenient way to navigate the world of web sites. YouTube is the most convenient way to navigate the world of videos.

Who’s going to be the most convenient way to navigate the world of basketball news, or politics news, or pet news?

To put the question to any news publisher: “How can you offer the best navigation of the world beyond your own content?”

Or to phrase it as Edward Roussel of the Telegraph did (riffing off of Jeff Jarvis), how do you “do what you do best and outsource the rest?”

That’s where Daylife can help. Daylife is a platform for adding to your site thousands or millions of pages of content that are refreshed and run automatically.

Daylife can help you bring the rest of the world to your site…

…as the Telegraph did when they launched their Earth Pulse section, augmenting their original reporting with Daylife power.

Daylife scales, letting you add thousand or millions of pages without adding head count…

…as Turner Sports did to launch portals about the NBA, PGA, MLB, and NASCAR.

This only works, however, if it truly is your site. The nice thing about the malleability of the Daylife platform is that you can seamlessly blend it into your own service, with your own voice, point of view, and look and feel…

…as USA Today has done, for example.

It’s all a moot point, however, if these Daylife-assisted pages can’t support real ad inventory (sponsor-friendly, high-value, not remnant). Fortunately, our customers report that they are able to sell Daylife-powered pages at the same CPMs as their original editorial pages.

And once you outsource the heavy engineering, analysis, and operations to a service like Daylife, editors and engineers are free to be creative, play with new ideas, and discover ways to navigate the world of content…

That’s all folks!