Mashable’s third annual Open Web Awards have kicked off, this time with a focus on Social Media. True to form, voters submit their nominations by logging in through Facebook or Twitter, making the contest even more viral.

We’re asking our friends to show their support and nominate Daylife for Best Site for Publishers. The nominations deadline is November 15, 2009, so please act quickly and help spread the word.

And to show our thanks, we’ll retweet every nomination to the world!  Nominate Daylife now.

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.

Indeed

More images from Iran here.

What’s more important: value or values?

In his latest PaidContent feature, Daylife CEO Upendra Shardanand takes a cue from former General Electric chief Jack Welch to consider whether the corporate obsession with shareholder value is misguided.  Shardanand warns of the results of a myopic fixation, saying that “in an age where investors and management can get out quick, leaving all the other stakeholders holding the bag, what we end up with is Enron, AIG and Tyco.”

Welch, considered the father of the shareholder value movement, recently told the Financial Times that, “on the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world,” he said. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . It is the product of your combined efforts – from the management to the employees.”

Welch took GE from a $14 billion valuation to $410 billion on his exit in 2004.  While he didn’t coin the term, Welch is credited with launching the shareholder value movement with a 1981 speech that urged executives to focus on long-term value over short-term profits.

His recent remarks have stirred debate.  Daylife’s Shardanand thinks they come at the right time, saying, “perhaps in this era of Obamanomics and global cataclysm, where the maxim of endless growth fueled by endless consumption is being questioned, we’re starting to reset a bit.”

He continues:

“And perhaps boards and VCs will take Jack Welch’s advice and depart from their scripts and start viewing shareholder value as a result, not an objective.  I’ll give a discount on the deal if any VC ever asks me questions along the lines of, “what do you do to make your office a fantastic place to work?” or “would you disclose the identity of one of your users to the Chinese government” or “who are you fighting for?”

Read the entire feature here on PaidContent, and share your thoughts in comments.

Today Daylife CEO Upendra Shardanand asks in a PaidContent feature how publishers can evolve storytelling to match the potential of the digital medium.

Upendra asserts that “new forms of storytelling could (a) make readers happier; (b) extend the lifespan of stories, making arcs from what are now transient and ephemeral events;  and (c) create new sponsorship opportunities. And perhaps save a few trees as well.”

He goes further:

Fifteen years into the web, the nature of journalistic storytelling has hardly changed from its print roots. Sure, there are minor differences. Headlines are SEO-optimized, and I can follow a writer on Twitter, post an off-the-cuff rant or rave, or Digg something I like. But the actual article is still the same beast. (Just like this column.)

Meanwhile, does Amazon.com (NSDQ: AMZN) bear any resemblance to shopping with the Sears catalog? Does Amazon even resemble itself from 14 years ago? Why has shopping been revolutionized while storytelling is stuck in a rut?

…

Click to read the rest of Upendra’s feature on PaidContent…

We have a bunch of this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning images.  You can find all these and many more here.

Last January I wrote :

“How do you get your local news? I ask because I live 15 miles from the Great Salt Lake. That’s not very far, especially by the standards of the American west, yet I learned about choleric birds living, flying, and dying around the lake in the New York Times by way of Daylife. At first I was shocked more by the fact that I didn’t know about this local story…So when it comes to local news, what’s your primary source: television, newspaper, online, or other?”

Today we can flesh out that “other” category a bit, from CrunchGear:

“It’s like a newspaper in your phone. I like the idea of location-targeted news from the Associated Press coming straight to my iPhone (and probably iPod Touch); it’s like the local page from your newspaper, but without the cow-tipping updates.”

(Daylife links added)

AP writer Seth Sutel explains:

“Companies that help connect advertisers with networks of Web sites will be among the sellers of ads for the new service and will share revenues with the news providers. The service will deliver local news from participating member newspapers and national and international news from AP. The reports will be organized by ZIP code. Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and others also offer news services tailored for mobile devices, but Jeffrey Litvack, global product development director for AP, said the Mobile News Network would offer easier access to local news stories.”

I’m hoping a few of our loyal readers chime in here with thoughts and opinions. Is this plan enticing?

First a few Daylife quotes by and about Candace Parker:

“I don’t feel I am changing the game. Candace Parker is dunking, and I’m just using my ability like she is. I look up to her. ” — Brittney Griner

“I feel like in the WNBA it’s going to be the rivalries. It’s going to be the Candice Wiggins vs. Candace Parker. It’s going to be the Sylvia Fowles vs. Erlana Larkins. I feel like it’s going to be great for the game.” — Candace Parker

Now to the Candace Parker photos:

         
         

And, finally, follow her path through the news with the Candace Parker Daylife topic page.

Josh Catone, while contemplating the finale of the Web 2.0 Expo, was forced to the conclusion “there is no web 3.0, there is no web 2.0 – there is just the web.”

While that’s true, there is just the web, it’s a bit like saying there are no humans, there are no primates, there are only fish-like invertebrates.

With all due respect to Catone, I’d like to take a minute to offer a contrary perspective.

Web or Web 1.0:
User wins a shopping spree able to take home all he or she can put in her basket in 60 minutes. He or she can shop at 15 stores. During the contest, the contestant madly runs around grabbing things, nearly randomly, off shelves. The contestant may or may not leave the first store. After 60 minutes, he or she has 294 items in her cart, 85% of these items are later given to charity.

Web 2.0:
User wins a shopping spree, only this time the user gives a list of a few things he or she really needs to a fast runner, a list of things he or she would really enjoy, but doesn’t fully need, to an endurance athlete, and a list of things that he or she already owns to a rocket scientist (this rocket scientist also a weekend warrior-type athlete). It’s the same 15 stores, but the contestant sits in Brookstone on a vibrating massage chair for the 60 minutes while the sprinter, marathoner, and rocket scientist do the shopping for him or her. After 60 minutes, the contestant has three carts, each filled with 400 items, 25% of which he or she later sells on eBay, 10% he or she gives away free on Craigslist, and another 10% she gives away via her Facebook and MySpace profiles. The contestant tried to sell stuff on her blog, but it didn’t work out.

Web 3.0:
A female user (because I’m tired of writing “he or she”) wins a shopping spree as outlined above. She sits in a vibrating massage chair on a beach. The 15 stores are now just one store. Her shoppers are now all enduro-sprinto-scientists on performance-enhancing drugs, each with the ability to both read her mind and teleport themselves and individual objects directly to her. She sips martinis in Maui, worried about the shopping spree and how it will affect the profits of the store, which she built herself, using parts from the original 15 stores. After 60 minutes she has fewer products in her carts than the previous contestant, but she keeps them all.

What do you think?

BuzzLogic is BlogRovr’s new owner. On the surface, it’s just another established company snatching up a startup, but scratch the surface, as Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web did, and some interesting questions arise.

A few of Kirkpatrick’s questions:

1. “Before you sell my data, even in anonymized aggregate, to a PR and ad sales firm – should I be able to export my [data]? Is that my data? Is it BlogRovr’s to sell without concern for my access to it?”
2. “If I use your tool and you use my data – who’s property is the end product?”
3. “Is clickstream data a user’s own responsibility?”

I see at least one non-web analogy here which could help frame the discussion. Student research leads to a product created while the student is enrolled in a university. The student in an appropriate analog would be using the tools provided by the institution. Whose product is it? Does it belong to the student or the university? Or the student’s professor?

Recently we blogged about the center of your social map and asked “are you at the center of your world?” If you see yourself at the center of your social map, creating, shaping, and culling the content you’re interested in (and allowing this content to find you), these questions may require some exploration on your part. Fortunately, Kirkpatrick does much of the exploring for us.

He ends by stating “BlogRovr and BuzzLogic deserve congratulations at least for recognizing the value of user data in the blogosphere. How should the rest of us feel about the news, though?”

So, what’s your take?

See them all on Robert Mugabe’s topic page.

“Zimbabwe is marking its independence day with President Robert Mugabe due to make his first major speech since the disputed elections three weeks ago. Mugabe is to address a rally in Harare to mark 28 years since independence from Britain and the end of white minority rule.” — Deutsche Welle

“The 300,000-strong South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) says it will not unload the weapons because they fear Robert Mugabe will use them to crack down on election opponents.” — Sky News

“Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe bitterly attacked former colonial ruler Britain today in his first major speech since disputed elections, saying London was paying the population to turn against him.” — SABC News

“‘Down with the British,’ Mr. Mugabe said before 15,000 people at a stadium in a suburb of Harare, the capital, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported. ‘Down with thieves who want to steal our country.’” — New York Times

“The 84-year-old [Mugabe] played a key role in the 1970s war of independence and took power as Zimbabwe’s first prime minister in 1980 on a wave of popular support.” — BBC News

“President Robert Mugabe belittled his political opponents as puppets of Britain, saying during independence celebrations Friday that the former colonial ruler wants Zimbabwe back.” — USA Today

“The Opposition says it defeated Mr Mugabe in elections held almost three weeks ago but Mr Mugabe has refused to release the official results.” — ABC News

Derrick Rose led the Memphis Tigers with a solid second half, and a certain taste of the NCAA championship.

But…

But Mario Chalmers and this:

           

“10 seconds to go and we think we’re national champions, and we’re not.” — Memphis coach John Calipari

And so closes the latest chapter of March Madness.