Florida-based DailyMe is a personalized news aggregation service that creates a daily online newspaper that can be delivered at set times via email or browsed from the web. The site aggregates news in a wide variety of topic areas from over 3,000 mainstream and blog sources, including the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Engadget, Time Magazine, and BusinessWeek.
DailyMe lets users choose and prioritize the news topics they are interested in tracking from a large list of prepackaged topical sources. Users can further drill down the topic modules by entering keywords – for example, only receiving Internet news related to “Facebook.” Users can also subscribe to specific sources, which can be refined by topic or keyword.
Setting up a newspaper is easy and the interface is slick, though I had a few issues. First, every time you add, move, or remove a source from your DailyMe selections lineup, the site has to refresh — which is slow and annoying. I also had trouble with some of the Javascript scrollers, which got stuck a few times and wouldn’t let me scroll to the source I wanted. Javascript effects are only good if they work!
Another issue I had was with the implementation of keywords. DailyMe creates a separate page in your newspaper for each keyword, but that’s not overly clear when setting the page up. As such, when I entered a bunch of keywords on a single line, I ended up with a bunch of blank pages.
Slight caveats aside, however, DailyMe was generally a breeze to set up. The quality of the news that DailyMe displays is pretty good, though the site doesn’t deliver a lot of it (however, the page is updated fairly regularly with new content). I am assuming that there is a mix of algorithmic and human editing at play here to decide which news stories are published at the top of the page, however that’s just a guess. The real alluring aspect of DailyMe is that they have secured licensing agreements with their content sources, meaning that articles are delivered in full — no teasers or headline links. This gives them a slight leg up, in terms of news contennt, on competing sites like MyYahoo!
I think that DailyMe will appeal to a more mainstream crowd than news aggregators like Digg, Techmeme, Reddit, Drudge Report, or Fark. Because DailyMe gathers actual content, rather than just links, it feels more like a personalized newspaper than an aggregation service. Set up is easy enough to appeal to novice Internet users, and the site offers a wide variety of distribution methods, including scheduled email delivery and online publication. The site even offers an automatic printing service via a downloadable client (Windows-only for now) — imagine how convenient it would be for some folks to wake up every morning to a personalized news report sitting in their printer tray.
What DailyMe lacks, is a little polish. It could also use some more customization options – i.e., it would be great to be able to block keywords, as well as track them, and to be able to subscribe to custom RSS feeds (a feature the company has said is coming).
