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!