Publishers are attempting to evolve in the Internet era to stay ahead of not only competitors but also the curve of technological innovation. Social media, rich media, syndicated media, aggregated media, wire service media … there are a lot of different sources of content to keep track of and integrate into your website.
A new tool from Daylife – the Daylife Publisher Suite – aims to keep content creators a step ahead of the game. It is not a content management system but rather a dashboard of applications that can edit live websites in real-time. Want to drag and drop a photo gallery into a post without going into the back end of your CMS? The Daylife Publisher Suite has the ability to do that and more.
The suite is similar to what social media content aggregator Storify does. With Storify, you build a story through social media channels, such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or other sources and then embed it within a CMS as a content frame. Now, think of the ability to do a Storify on a live website in real-time without the embedded-able content frame. That is essentially what the Daylife Publishers Suite does.
Daylife Publisher Suite – Intro from Daylife on Vimeo.
The way the publisher suite works is as simple as installing a piece of a line of Javascript on your website, similar to how you would drop in the code for something like Google Analytics at the header of your site. Daylife will then be able to open an editing mode within a live website that enables content creators to use the suite’s applications to modify the page’s contents.
Not Yet A CMS Substitute, But Soon
“It is very deliberately and aggressively not a content management system,” said Marc Hedlund, Chief Product Officer at Daylife. “The content management system is the problem … The Daylife Publisher’s Suite is intended to give the tools and capabilities to people who feel constrained by the tools they have.”
Right now, Daylife is constrained itself by content management systems. The suite works on pages that have already been published, hence a content creator needs to build media through a CMS before it can be edited by Daylife on a live website. Hedlund said that Daylife is planning a way around that by being able to build pages entirely in Javascript but in the initial rollout of the suite is as a post-publish editing tool.
Yet, Daylife has properties that can help publishers create excellent content. For instance, Daylife can create slideshows through syndication partners like Getty Images. It can then drop slideshows created automatically in a standard slideshow view, mosaic (like Google Image Search results), large format (think of Boston.com’s Big Picture) or via a touch gallery. The touch gallery would look like a standard slideshow from a PC but would be swipe-able on a tablet or smartphone.
The suite can also create pull quotes, drag in topic-releveant social media feeds, create polls and interactive timelines and teasers.
Other sites can help publishers with this type of content creation, but not quite in real-time on a live page. Newser helps machine-based aggregation with a human touch and OneSpot analyzes stories across the Web by studying link patterns.
Daylife was one of the ReadWriteWeb Top 50 Real-Time Start Ups in 2009.
