A day in the life ...

Jeff Jarvis, Craig Newmark and a collection of other notables have all invested in a new news aggregator called Daylife that has now launched. You can have a look here.

Its architecture isn't obvious or transparent, at least to me. I've only begun to poke around the site and don't have an opinion, but I'd recommend starting with the tour. According to Jarvis (his post is available here) there's much more to come in subsequent versions.

I'm also taken by a discussion in the comments to Jarvis' post discussing the role of editors in a world of ubiquitous information. Here's a taste of the back-and-forth you'll find there:

PETER: ... I strongly disagree with you saying “it analyzes the news”. At best, it puts together some statistical numbers about the flow of the news and it’s redundance. This is not news-analysis but search-engine vodoo which has nothing to do with relevance whatsoever.

Interestingly enough I see more and more of our collegues in the media switching their personal habits from being complete newsjunkies to very delibaretly picking a handful of trusted sources and authors (and bloggers) which provide a much more efficient way of getting a view of the world.

At the same time, all my not-so-media-savvy friends tend to become stressed out newsjunkies, getting lost in the ocean of sugar-coated peanuts in an age of everything-is-realtime-and-therefore-news. It’s tempting at first, and then it gets overwhelming and frustrating

JEFF: ... As for the role of editors, which is what you’re really talking about, I agree; in a completely open world, there’s more need for editing (read: no gatekeeping but selection, digging, vetting, and adding perspective) than before. As I said above, I think we’re heading to an architecture — not just technical, but in a business sense — of needing to support (find, send audience to) journalism at its source; we hope this powers that. Finally, it’s also necessary for editors to present not just their coverage but their coverage in the context of other coverage (here’s our story, says the Times of Anytown and here’s the coverage of the Timeses of New York, London, and India). These, I hope, will be tools that help you and your harried friends - which is all of us — find better coverage, coverage closer to events, coverage from different perspectives.