This a guest post by Daylife’s lead designer Michael Surtees. It was originally published on his blog DesignNotes.

I’ve been testing a slightly updated idea of distributing content. While it’s not unique and the tools are available to almost everyone, there’s a number of intermediary connections that rely on each other to make it work. The underlying concept is that people have unique relationships depending on the different web tools they connect with their friends and peers. For example a person might have some good connections on twitter, yet that relationship isn’t the same on Flickr. They’re interested in reading some quotes but not trading photos. Another scenario might be that people are connected via Facebook and Friendfeed. Because Facebook has become full of people they’ve chosen to see what stuff they’re looking at by what’s posted to FriendFeed, yet for another person status updates keep them in touch. It’s all fragmented.

Now consider another scene. Last year I was part of a group of people that ran a site that asked people to take photos at 10:15 am local time. Once they had shot the image they needed to download it from their camera and email it to the general email address. From there one of four people would manually upload the photo, copy+paste the title information and tag the location. It was a fun project but the manual labor for one photo was quite a lot. The second part of the equation was that the images were hosted on the site and a viewer actually had to visit the site to see the images. Pretty basic stuff that most people take for granted.

When I think of Fragmented Medias as an idea, I see it as one piece of content being pushed out in as many different directions as possible, allowing for different meanings depending on how the content is pushed through a channel while finding ways to be connected in other media spaces. My latest photo experiment is called #walkingtoworktoday. The rules are simple and open to anyone—while walking to work take a photo from a mobile device. From there the photo needs to be pushed to twitter via flickr while containing the hashtag #walkingtoworktoday somewhere in the tile. With a simple push of the button via email from a phone, a number of different automated triggers happen that eases the burden of labor unlike the other photo project. The responsibility is left to the photographer. While I like using a mobile device, a person could take the time to upload an image with a better camera as long as the hashtag is in the title and is connected to flickr.

A typical walking to work today process would be as follows for me. I’m walking to work through Manhattan and come across something memorable in Soho. I pull out my iPhone, take the photo and email the photo to flickr with a special email address that will also connect with Twitter. In the subject line of the email I’ll try to keep my message to less than 140 characters and use #walkingtoworktoday somehow. Once the photo has been uploaded and the message readable on Twitter and number of other things happen. My tweets are connected to my Facebook status, so the photo link is announced there, I also have Twitter and Flickr connected to Friendfeed which in turn is connected to Facebook. So a number of different ways people stay in touch with me have all seen my #walkingtoworktoday photo. It’s possible that the friends from Twitter aren’t connected to me in Facebook and vice versa so I’ve been able to cover a couple unique mediums with a simple push of send via email.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that the process is great for a one to many push, but how does it become a group thing? I use Tweetdeck and have a search for #walkingtoworktoday so I can see who’s posting what and seeing the images from there. But there isn’t one dedicated space outside of Flickr to see the photos, and even then it’s only seeing it through one medium—I don’t get to see the tweets. So that’s why I decided there needed to be a site. Because I have a lot of knowledge in taming the fire hose of information from working at Daylife, I decided to create a site http://walkingtoworktoday.designnotes.info/ using Daylife tools that contained Flickr and Twitter moduals. The main modual streams photos from Flickr while the right rail shows the tweets. It’s an interesting redundancy that works. On one side there’s the large photos, the people’s avatars and tweets put the photos in context on the right, plus at time the photos and tweets won’t be in the same order. Because I have the full set of Daylife tools at my disposal I thought it would be interesting to pull quotes from general news about walking to work, and headlines of walking stories. Just for good measure I selected a number of topics that people might also be interested in. From there if any quote, headline or topic is selected there’s a ton of info available, but if people are interested i looking at the photos of people walking to work, they’re available and hosted on Flickr.

I really like the potential of this, everyone has a certain entry point to push the content in the manner that they want, but also allow for hooks that can be pushed into other content areas while leaving a trail where it originally started. Another remarkable thing is that at all times I know who the creator of the digital piece is. The name is connected on Flickr, Twitter and any other content distributing medium. It’s also amazing to consider that once the system is set up and the nodes are connected that with one push of a button a number of different conversations can start. Someone might read the tweet, like the photo and re-tweet what I just said, or maybe just reply with a simple mention. On Flickr someone might favourite the image or comment just like a person could do on FriendFeed or Facebook too. Now consider the number of eyes that have seen or read that one photo that was pushed to them in comparison of having to hope that someone visits a website. The odds and clicks are infinitely higher with a number of Fragmented Medias as opposed to one static site. Lots to explore with a concept like this.

Curious to hear what others considered Fragmented Medias last night on Twitter, this was what I heard.

Judy_Sims (who has a great blog btw) mentioned “The rise of the trusted editor/curator who aggregates by target audience and/or topic, ad networks organized by channel.”. daniel_howells passed along “Few years ago, only a few media types and channels; now hundreds of types and channels. Exposure is weakened/fragmented”. And inakiescudero suggested “Fragmented media means + difficult to reach consumers, + important to include your single minded benefit in every message”.

Where is the digital news model heading? Craigslist founder – and Daylife investor – Craig Newmark published A Nerd’s Take on the Future of News Media Monday in the Huffington Post, emphasizing the scarcity of trust online and pointing to curation as a means to close the gap.  He equates trust to human curation, stating:

The great opportunity for news organizations is to constructively demonstrate trustworthy reporting, and to visibly do so.

News curation, that is, selecting what’s news and should be visible, that’s an equally big deal.

Newmark appears to embrace the Pro-Am (Professional-Amateur) model advocated by NYU Professor Jay Rosen, asserting that the new model “will be a balance of professional editing and collaborative news filtering.”

Repeating his mantra that “Trust is the new black,” Newmark believes that a newsroom’s insistence on “objectivity” can actually be a “major destroyer of trust.” He concludes:

The successful news organizations of the future will pursue models for news curation/selection which is a hybrid of professional editing and collaboration among talented consumers.

Newmark gives us a lot to digest.  So how does Daylife fit into this evolving media landscape?

Daylife allows editors to curate, organize, and aggregate the web’s best content with simple tools and intelligent content analysis.  Learn more about what we do here.

(This is a special guest post by Michael Surtees, Daylife’s Design Director and Publisher of DesignNotes.)

For the last couple of months I haven’t been mentioning much about Daylife. The main reason was we’ve been working on a new product called SmartGalleries. It’s a product that gives a lot of control to publishers to curate and manage photo galleries. They can be 100% hand curated, 100% dynamically generated or a combination of the two depending on how much time a publisher wants to spend sorting through images.

To do that we made the process relative simple in three steps. First we created a system that publishers can log into to find the images that they want to publish. (Actually the login screen is one of my favourite things…) Once they’ve created a gallery and edited it, they can publish it to a dynamically generated gallery page. Within the system it’s easy to make edits to the actually gallery page so it can look like the publisher’s original site.

Once the gallery is published and a slideshow is embed on a publisher’s site, the real fun starts. When a person clicks on an image they’re taken to a smart gallery which gives detail photo information. Below that are dynamically generated galleries on related photo galleries.

What I like about this is that it’s really easy to start clicking away to explore more images that a person didn’t realize was available. I like to think of it as infinite clickability. Within the galleries there’s a couple different views. My favourite view is the mosaic because it keeps the image proportion with minimum cropping, and allows the image to be large enough to see a lot of detail. There’s also a thumbnail view so people can scan images quickly.

This product was built from the ground up with some really smart people from Daylife. I learned a ton from the team working alongside them. The engineers and developers did an amazing job. What’s fascinating to see is that we took one of the things people really liked about Daylife.com — the photo galleries, and made it into a product that publishers could use very quickly.

I’ve made a smart gallery photo stream of Spring 2010 Fashion Show at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Bryant Park as an example of the product in action. The first couple images I’ve picked and from there the system automatically populates new images as they come in. You can view that at http://designnotes.info/?page_id=1891.