Speaking about the changes, General Manager Mike Hodges said, “We’re trying to combine the power and the strength of the local news and information we bring, but couple that with other things and really make SignOn not just a news source but also a lifestyle choice.”

Read more about SignOn’s changes in: Sign On San Diego gets new look and ‘San Diego U-T’ Relaunches Website.

Want to find out more about the technology behind SignOn San Diego’s new site?  Learn about Daylife Select here.

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.

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”.

Now we’re seeing the rise of the topical page as the atomic unit of content.  Journalists will no longer write stories, persay.  They’re going to write topics, which will have story-like elements, but won’t look anything like the articles they focus on today.

As an example, he notes that, “Smart news organizations are building topics pages,” linking to Dallas News topic pages powered by Daylife, featured below.

Moor gets to the heart of what Daylife CEO Upendra Shardanand describes in his PaidContent feature “Storytelling is Stuck in a Rut–What Publishers Can Do About It.”  Shardanand praises structural innovation in the publishing industry, but wonders why the art form hasn’t evolved, concluding 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.

It appears Anthony Moor would agree, and is enjoying the ride as this new storytelling process takes shape.

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.

The event, hosted to capacity in Daylife’s open loft space, was a rousing success. Afterward Penenberg thanked Daylife, saying via Twitter that, “it was a very smart room of people.” Michael Gluckstadt, a Fast Company reporter on hyperlocal news said, “The launch party for Viral Loop was like my twitter feed come to life.”

Author Adam Penenberg and Daylife's Rachel Sterne during his introduction.

The celebration included journalists, academics and entrepreneurs such as SmartMoney Magazine Editor in Chief Jonathan Dahl, Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon, Sawhorse Media and Shorty Awards Founder Gregory Galant, Brew Media Relations Founder Brooke Hammerling, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute Director Brooke Kroeger, Huffington Post Citizen Journalism Editor Matt Palevsky, MySomeday CEO Joe Satto, and New York Times reporter Brian Stelter.

Guests chatted over wine and cheese, and were treated to a short talk by Penenberg and a demonstration of the Viral Loop Facebook application by creators StudioE9.

Viral Loop is off to a strong start, thanks to what The New York Observer’s Gillian Reagan calls a “book blitz”:

He got coverage on popular tech blogs, and sent out a bunch of Twitter tweets . He recruited web design firm StudioE9 to launch a web site with interactive graphics, concoct a Facebook application that would tell users “what are your friends worth” and create a leaderboard ranking the widget’s users and Web celebrities. A video from his publisher, Hyperion Books, was posted on YouTube. A Viral Loop iPhone application popped up in the app store on Monday.

Well put.  A huge thanks to all who joined for the party, included those who added their names to our Twitter wall: @jasoncfry @mpalevsky @annalisaburgos @trinaalbus @mysomeday @nyctype @lynneluvah @the_searcher @kraykray.

Daylife is committed to supporting digital innovation in NYC.  If you’re looking for a place to host your next event,  send us a message @Daylife on Twitter.

As part of the event, we’ll be streaming the Viral Loop Facebook application, which TechCrunch covered a couple weeks back.  The app measures how much you’re worth based on your Facebook activity, out of the company’s massive valuation.

We’re excited to be part of the event, and will report on how it goes!

Are you planning an event that needs a free venue?  Daylife is committed to supporting NYC’s digital media community–please feel free to reach out and we’d love to discuss with you.

The result is a deep, thoughtful look at what Daylife has accomplished and where we’re headed, from curation to automation and everything in between. Read the excerpt below for a peek at what’s in store, and find whole piece at MediaShift.

How has your vision for Daylife changed over the last two years since you’ve launched the site and service?

Upendra Shardanand: When we launched the business, the concept was to do a platform and a site that the platform powered. We launched in December ‘06 with a client using the platform, and in January ‘07 with the site, and pretty quickly our focus went to the platform. The concept is to help publishers easily and quickly curate, organize and aggregate media, whether it’s from their own archives, from around the web, or from other third-party providers. A lot of our publishers are not traditionally deep into technology, so we’re building the technology layer and editor tools so that the process is effortless and scales.

Our first big break came at the end of ‘07 when we signed with USA Today. They called us and said they have a travel section with one blogger blogging about cruise lines. They were trying to sell sponsorships to Royal Caribbean and other cruise lines but they didn’t have enough traffic in this area. So they took Daylife and gave it to their editor and IT guys and built Daylife-powered pages with photo galleries and sections for every port of call and cruise operator. It went from being one editor and a skinny blog to being one editor plus Daylife, and it’s much more of a news portal. Traffic jumped by seven times within three weeks.

Until that point, we had focused on 100 percent automated solutions, where everything is automated. But with USA Today, the blogger Gene Sloan wanted a console where he can tweak things and move things around. That put us on a path to be much more around building tools that help people curate themselves along with automated assistance.

What about the tools you are building for Getty Images, now that they’ve become an investor in Daylife?

Shardanand: The Getty relationship is focused around distributing tools to their client base that revolve around the workflow of an editor. So they can do what they do but more efficiently, and with a lot more intelligence, and make their job easier and faster. The first thing we’re doing with Getty is called SmartGalleries [see demo, below]. The basic problem for any wire service is supplying assets to any publisher. With Getty, the assets are photos, and they just drop that at the publisher’s doorstep, and the publisher has to figure out how to ingest it, put it in their CMS [content management system], figure out a workflow, maximize user engagement.

So we built this tool so that people can quickly go in, build a gallery by searching and dragging things around, and make a player. It also has automated assistance where an editor can say ‘here’s one photograph, fill in the rest for me, based on what I’ve already picked.’ Once the gallery is published, the automation will keep it up to date, and can build related galleries. So if you have galleries around the U.S. Open, it will automatically generate galleries for Roger Federer or Serena Williams. An editor can launch a gallery, or an infinite web of galleries, which is great for the editor, because it’s an easy way to publish very quickly.

Read the full MediaShift interview here, or click here to learn more about SmartGalleries.

Daylife has long been obsessed with real-time media, and that’s why we built tools to help publishers manage voracious audiences and a nonstop news cycle. With tools like Daylife Select and SmartGalleries, producers ensure they are always offering the timeliest, most relevant content, without demanding staff time or resource commitment.

See a clip of the ReadWriteWeb feature below:

Sims takes an unflinching look at the biggest dilemmas facing the print media industry, and dissects them one-by-one.  The abridged list:

Lie #1: We can manage this disruption from within an integrated organization.

Lie #2: Print advertising reps can sell online ads too

Lie #3: Aggregators are killing my business

Lie #4: We can re-create scarcity by putting up pay walls

Lie #5: Our readers paid for news in the past, they will again

Lie #6: There will never be enough online revenue to support our newsroom

Lie #7: No one will ever cover crime/health/city hall the way we do

Lie #8: Our readers can’t be trusted/they are idiots/they are assholes

Lie #9 Democracy will collapse without us

Lie #10: I can compete with the best digital leaders/thinkers/creators in the world without becoming an active member of the online community.

We identify most with Lie #3:  Aggregators are killing my business. Sims’ tough-love wake-up call refutes the fallacy, and singles out Daylife as the aggregator that newspapers like. Sims writes :

No they’re not.

This one drives me nuts.  Don’t blame Arianna, Tina, Larry and Sergey or all those Tweeple out there.  If anyone killed the newspaper business as we knew it, it was Craig Newmark.

People making this argument always forget that newspapers can be aggregators too.  As I asked earlier this week, why is there no HuffPo equivalent in the UK?

You don’t even need humans to do the aggregation.  Daylife, Evri, Inform et al will do it for you and in the case of Daylife in particular, brilliantly.

We’re humbled by the accolades. But we hope Sims knows that Daylife also allows for hand-picked curation of content, through products like Daylife Select and features like Editor’s Picks. It’s part of how Daylife gives publishers a complete toolkit for curating and aggregating the highest quality content on the web.