widgetBeat…

Track news popularity with Daylife’s widget

March 17th, 2008

by Al Merkrebs, March 17, 2008 @ 11:27 a.m. PDT

If you have a need for, or simply enjoy, tracking news trends on the Web, you’ll like this widget from Daylife. They are an online news site with outstanding page layouts and search functions, but it’s their news indexing feature that really grabbed my attention.

Daylife sets themselves apart by giving you the actual number of Internet articles on any given news topic. The service allows you to enter several topics of your choice for tracking data that quantifies how those topics stack up against each other. The data reflects the number of articles on the Internet on a this-week vs. last-week comparison. Raw numbers and trending scores reveal what’s hot and what seems to be cooling in the Internet news universe. It’s like seeing the results of a virtual popularity contest.

AND, Daylife offers a widget — the “News Index” widget — that does the same thing, for you to put on your Web pages. You build your own customized version of the widget (by adding news topics, or people in the news, etc., ), and then you are given the option of getting the code or uploading it to your choice of popular social sites.

I built a news index widget that compares the number of Internet articles about some of the popular social networks.

This widget will be very valuable for people like me, who do a lot of Web tracking. Or for people who just like to see the amount of news buzz that, say, Halle Berry’s baby is getting versus the Fed Reserve meeting.

Pros: Very easy to build and customize. Easy to see the numbers of stories for each topic, and their percentage of growth (or decline) from the previous week to the current week. When you click a story’s “more” button you are taken to Daylife’s very rich results page.

Cons: Only one or two recent stories can be seen, so clicking the “more” button is often another necessary click; it would be nice if they let you set the number of articles that pop down. Also, it’s not clear at first what happens when you click on any one of the rows. I thought I was clicking on individual items in the row, to get more details on the numbers and score, but all that happens is that the row pops down to reveal recent stories on the topic

Coolness factor: 3/5

Engine required: None. Just copy and paste code into your Web site, or follow instructions to insert into one of the popular social sites.

Build and get the widget here: Daylife Custom News Index

Entry Filed under: widget reviews