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DailyMe delivers news that prints itself

Discover news based on your tastes with DailyMe.

Josh Lowensohn Former Senior Writer
Josh Lowensohn joined CNET in 2006 and now covers Apple. Before that, Josh wrote about everything from new Web start-ups, to remote-controlled robots that watch your house. Prior to joining CNET, Josh covered breaking video game news, as well as reviewing game software. His current console favorite is the Xbox 360.
Josh Lowensohn
2 min read

DailyMeis a customizable news aggregator with a neat twist--it can be set up to automatically print up the day's news at a selected time each morning, emulating some of the experience of having a newspaper delivered to your door.

The service lets you pick all the topics you're interested in and will group them together on a single page that's updated throughout the day. There are broad topics to choose from, and each one has its own menu of subtopics in case you want to hone your feed. There's also an option to call out keywords you want to track, which can help narrow a wide topic such as technology or sports.

Users can pick what kind of topics they're interested in to shape the news that comes in. Even terrorism.

Besides keywords, advanced users can fine tune the topics by the source. Sources are listed in a directory and with a specific grouping of feeds. In that sense DailyMe becomes more of an intelligent RSS reader, as you can pick the news sites or blogs where you want your stream of information coming from.

DailyMe provides several ways to ingest your news. As mentioned above, using a small desktop application DailyMe will phone home at whatever time you select and automatically print out the latest news from those topics. You can also set up multiple alerts per day if you feel like filling up your e-mail in-box with news feeds.

I found the actual reading experience to be somewhat bland. The news is spread out over several pages instead of being in one place like other news aggregation services. It's not a deal killer, but I found it to be too much work to browse through each category. I think a lot of people who are used to getting a ton of stories on a single page on major newspaper sites or news portals will feel a little out of their element.

The one nice thing is that the stories are all hosted on the DailyMe site, meaning you're not just on a portal page that's going to jump you off. There's also an integrated commenting system that's separate from the original site, as well as a one- to five-star rating system that helps track what's hot on the site. At the moment DailyMe doesn't seem to be taking advantage of these ratings or comments, as they're disjointed from the rest of the content.

Earlier today the company announced that Neil Budde, former vice president and editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Sports is its new president (see News.com story). Budde is also the same guy who helped create The Wall Street Journal Online--so I see big things from DailyMe in the coming months.

Other services that aggregate news based on your tastes include: Tiinker, FaveBot, Spotback, and LeapTag.

DailyMe
DailyMe grabs news from topics you're interested in. If you're feeling old school you can even download a desktop plug-in that prints out the news for you. CNET Networks