A formal announcement is forthcoming from Daylife — the news site that has popped up in conversation over the past year because of Craig Newmark, Jeff Jarvis and others’ involvement in the project.
The New York Times Company appears to be one of the top investors, which could foreshadow a bold move into user-generated news and reader-customizable content.
Staci Kramer at Paid Content writes:
The mission is to gather and organize news in ways that are most relevant to the user. That could be by event, topic, author, geography or other factors. Source pages that show what a journalist writes about or who is quoted are part of the mix. RSS plays an important role. In an interview, [Upendra] Shardanand [founder of Firefly] said the distributed platform—designed for use across multiple sites—will be open “to a degree” with options for revenue sharing and licensing for those doing a heavy volume. “Anyone can take what we’re building and add it to their own site … Obviously, we have to make some revenue.”
Nice to see the Times making a proactive move long after their relatively idiotic acquisition of About.com. Interested to see how — if at all — Jay Rosen‘s NewAssignment.Net is involved.
Interesting post. I have stumbled and twittered this for my friends. Hope others find it as interesting as I did.