Daylife raises $8.3M in round 2.  There was a round 1?  Wasn’t social news over?  And does that mean investors are twice as dumb?  Not quite. 

Yet another news service is getting funded though, does this suggest that indeed news on the Web is still a wide open game?

In all fairness/to clarify, I have not spent much time looking at Daylife, there are simply too many to go through these days.  Not a day goes by where a new social bookmarking icon doesn’t pop up below an article, in fact.

But if news is still wide open, this begs the question: what would constitute the perfect news product of the 21st century?

I think I can sum it up with three things: Topix + TechMeme + Digg.  But, there’s something missing, or rather, all of those things have something to be desired.   Oddly, none of those are search engines!

Maybe fittingly so, because search engine will forever be slightly or very late to index new sources… maybe that’s why Digg, TechMeme and Topix work well in their own right.

- Admittedly, Topix was great until newspapers invested in it… after that it’s almost useless… but the premise / theory is great.  You almost think that it’s become the poster boy for “don’t accept money from old, old media.”

- TechMeme is useful and in many ways never ceases to amaze me, but then on some occasions I find it makes some of the best minds braindead because it becomes a downward spiral.  People don’t want to start writing original things because they just want to continue the “discussion.”  By the way, that term (discussion) should also be in the most obnoxious terms. 

As a side note, one thing that is great about TechMeme is that it encourages editors to go back to old stories and add links to new ones, keeping old articles fresh in that regard.  Only TechMeme encourages you to that as a publisher, and for that it deserves some credit.  Admittedly, few editors will admit they do that, because on the surface it seems like you’re chasing links back, but it does add context and relevancy to older posts so it’s worth doing it, even if TechMeme won’t index you all the time.  I’m curious if Gabe realized that or sought to do that.  Better yet, I’ll ask him.

- Digg is a waste of time in many ways, but it’s a fascinating concept.  If it wasn’t hijacked by a dozen 12 year olds, it would do wonders.

All to say, if I had, say $1M to venture into a social news arena, I’d do something along those lines.

For the record, we have a social bookmarking/news tool ready to go, but we’re so busy with WatchMojo.com, the blogs, the search, and of course StreetMojo.com that I have not yet even dove into social news, and probably won’t… but as I see it, news and the entire information challenge is still wide open.

What do you think is missing from that recipe?

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