In contrast to traditional media such as newspapers or television, digital media like the World Wide Web are generally dynamic. Here, news is no longer bound to a specific form or context. This separation of content and presentation poses challenges and opportunities at the same time. The formal presentation is not necessarily able to synthesize with the content in order to support its communication. This work tries to answer the question, how a preliminary linguistic analysis can contribute to finding adequate presentational forms that relate to each news’ specific content.

Wordle is a toy (nifty tool) for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Wordle also lets you create these "word clouds" using a RSS feed. Sumit Kataria has written a PHP script to generate RSS feeds from DayPIs for any search term you have. Just a perfect fit to use with Wordle!

Here is a RSS feed for Barack Obama - http://develop.daylife.com/demos/feed.php?query=%22Barack%20Obama%22

Feed it to Wordle on http://wordle.net/create and here is what you get

Another RSS feed for "Global Warming" OR "Climate Change" - http://develop.daylife.com/demos/feed.php?query=%22Global%20Warming%22%2...

And here is its Wordle! -

Candidate Tracker is a design for a widget or a module on a page to bring together background information, news stories and pictures in one complete grabbable module. You should also be able to search for a candidate by typing in a name. For e.g., the design below shows the universe of John McCain in one succinct model. The picture gallery and the newsfeed sections are supposed to refresh automatically to move on to the next picture or news story.

You can use topic_getRelatedStories to build the newsfeed. topic_getRelatedImages can be used to build the picture gallery. As for background information, you can use the DayPI topic_getInfo to get a block of text that is the abstract summary from wikipedia. However, it does not give you a the broken down information as in this design.

For the background information, it would be a good idea to do a mashup with some other people search APIs. For e.g., the ZoomInfo API  - http://api.zoominfo.com/PartnerAPI/XmlOutput.aspx?query_type=people_search_query&pc=dn7vdjv2wjmcpepbj9zg8u7f&firstName=John&lastName=McCain

This is still an idea. If you would like to implement it for us, let us know.

Dipity lets you create simple and visual timelines by adding events manually or adding RSS feeds to automatically create events.

Sumit just launched a RSS feed generator that lets you create RSS feeds for any topic or search term using the Daylife Search API. And this is my first mashup using the RSS feed creator - Barack Obama News Timeline.

I simply added the following feed in this timeline - http://demos.daylife.com/demos/feed.php?query=title:Obama&limit=5. And here is the result:

Do not stop yourself from creating more innovative timelines. Simply signup on Dipity and use the Daylife RSS feeds to generate the events for your timelines.

Also check out the Timeline widget in flash for Topics and the trendrr mashup to create trend graphs for news coverage about any topic or search term.

Trendrr is a service to track, compare and share data. You can track data from sources that are supported by Trendrr or you can add your own dataset. You can have multiple data sets and you can lay them on top of each other to compare these data sets. Plus, you can export your data set in a visual graph or raw data in XML, json or as an excel spreadsheet.

This recipe demos how you can use Daylife's APIs to get news coverage about any topic and then send that data to Trendrr on periodic basis using their API. The end result is a trending graph that you can share with anyone for news converage about any topic.

Below are trend graphs for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain in three different visual formats.

We have hosted a script for you to create your trendrr graphs (more details below) or download it to customize the data. Read below how you can create similar graphs using Daylife and Trendrr Services. 

This is a proposal about a project that we had submitted to the Netsquared Mashup Challenge. It proposes to create a mashup using Daylife and Twitter APIs.

If you would be interested in implement this idea, please drop us a note. 

The design below is for a mashup to bring together news and reviews about books at one place.

The Vision
Like many Daylife fans, we regularly find ours immersed in the interesting and endlessly connected news topics and photos. In the back of our mind, there's always this perfect Daylife image-centric news browser waiting to be built. Like many things in life, we thought about it, talked about it, never did anything about it.

The Contest
We heard about the DayPI contest on 7/15 while chatting with the Daylife team in New York. Later that day, we brought back the idea of the perfect news browser - if we built it, it would surely be worthy of the contest. Can we build it in a few days? Nah.. we thought it was too late in the game, and we couldn't possibly build something good enough in such short amount of time to be competitive.

To build or not to build
A few days past, the urge of building the news browser was too great to resist - we knew that combining our vision of the viewer with the new web application model we are working on at Zoomino, we would be able to build something remarkable. So on Friday night 7/18, one week before the deadline, we decided to go for it! The next morning, David and I sat down for 4 hours to brainstorm what this browser would look like. We knew we wanted a kick-ass visualizer that would take the rich content of Daylife and make it easy to fly through. We looked at various existing image viewers, sketched out the basic design and workflow.

The Global Team Effort
When our design sketches reached our dev team in China, 1/2 way around the globe, it was already Monday 7/21, only 4 days left. Our developers studied the feasibility of design. With the DayPI documentation site and a few hints from Vineet of Daylife, we got comfortable with the API, and development started right away. On Tuesday 7/22, only 1 day later, Tiger, our Flash guru and Basil our web technology expert had the prototype built. That night, with David in Memphis, the dev team in China, and myself in New York, the global team discussed about the prototype, and set directions for the improvements to be made in the next few days. Two more one-day agile development cycles later, we have the viewer we wanted, and best of all, it's riding on the Zoomino platform, giving it wings to fly to ANY web page.

The End Product - "Take Daylife with You"
From idea inception to a posh Daylife application that can run on ANY web page, it took us less than a week to conclude the effort. We call this application "Take Daylife with You" because using this application, a user can take the wealth of Daylife news content to any web page to explore concepts he/she deems news worthy. The speed at which we got this done is of course a great testament the Zoomino team's passion and ability, but it's also proof of the power of the DayPI.