Daylife - Novel Concept

Upendra Shardanand, the founder, originally describes this idea "like IMDb for the news" -- a way to browse through histories and connections of the people, places, and topics that make up news stories. Daylife, a news portal trying to bring up the global news all bundled up was launched last
week. A novel concept, which apart from putting all the news together provides -
1. A daily cover - which is pretty analogous to the concept of say, TIME Cover - focussing on a particular item.
2. Tagged Related News - For every news item, the relations are shown in terms of places, people, et al and you can subsequently browse news related to such tags.
3. MyWorld - where you can label the news items which can be read later and they'd be placed in your MyWorld folder. Understandably, one needs to register to use this feature.
4. Quoted - Flip through quotes by the people involved in each story.
5. Timeline - See how a specific topic has come in and out of the news over time.




However, going through daylife, I still felt that something was missing. How can a site whose aim is to deliver global news not provide a RSS facility. Well, how many of us go to buy the newspaper everyday, rather than getting it delievered at our doorsteps? Doesn't make much sense to me..

Further, sometimes folks while designing a site, try and put out way too much information, more than what's required and at times it does feel out of place. Well, relevant information is understandable, but it was intriguing what 'Al-Qaeda' was doing in the related stories when I did a simple query on 'Australia England Cricket'.. interesting.. or rather irritating.

Another premise which is debatable, is the utmost flashy look to the entire thing. You know what, the first thing I liked about Google News was the simplicity with which they provided the news. Its just one page, and you have the prime news for all the genres, be it political, sports, entertainment or technology. First thing that I do and probably most of us, is to browse through the entire page at once to see what is interesting, rather than going to different tabs to get the related news.

Well, Daylife is indeed a nobel concept, the fundamental idea of bundling related news is pretty fresh. Considering its still in the beta version, I'd have my eyes set on it to see what comes up in the future. Guys keep it simple - is all I can say..