Thanks for giving us yet another reason to celebrate this week. Happy Birthday & many, many, many more!!

- DailyMe North & DailyMe South

We’ve just thrown the switch on the next step in the evolution of DailyMe – our DailyMe.com news destination.

This user-centric web destination brings the DailyMe experience to an even broader audience through three distinct editions:

• DailyMe, our original, personalized service;
• DailyWe, where stories are ranked by the community; and
• Top News, selected by our DailyMe editorial team.

All three editions include the robust content, both licensed and user-generated, that users of our DailyMe service have enjoyed for some time. They also bring together many of the technology components we’ve built: our personalization application, delivery platform, advanced news search, rules and processes for importing and classifying content, and RSS feeds. And, of course, users can continue to read licensed news stories without ever leaving DailyMe.

The three editions can be selected via tabs on the DailyMe homepage, where Top News will be the default. (Of course, existing users will continue to receive their DailyMe personalized edition without interruption across all delivery options.)

We’ve been working on this launch for some time and are very excited about the new site. So please test out our new editions and do let us know how you like them.

- Eduardo

I don’t think you need to be an investigative reporter to unearth the reason I’m on a panel at this week’s IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors) conference but not in the printed program.
The answer is in the location: Miami.

When another panelist canceled and they needed a fill-in, I think they decided it would be easier to get a South Florida-based online newsman as a last-minute replacement. Of course, I probably do have something to say on the topic: “Catching them in your Web: Making investigations viral.” In fact, I think DailyMe is part of the equation for getting great journalist work out to a wider audience by matching user interests with top-quality content.

- Neil

We think it's high time we celebrated the launch of DailyMe's public Beta.

So, DailyMe is teaming with Mashable’s US Summer Tour 2008 to put on the official DailyMe Launch Party. The event will held on Saturday, Aug. 2 from 7-10 pm at the Opium Garden at 136 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL. We'll be at South Beach’s hottest club with drinks, appetizers, models and, of course, what would a Miami party be without the beach!

If you're going to be in South Florida that week, please join us. You'll have an opportunity to meet with the DailyMe team -- including Eduardo, Neil & me - as well as others whose names you might not know yet but whose efforts have been critical to the successful launch and development of DailyMe.

So stop by and celebrate with us! Information on how to get tickets will be made available over the next several weeks.

- Lisa

It was great to catch up with so many people last week at the Interactive Media conference in Las Vegas. Panels on the need for better metrics and “are we bold enough?” were among those I found energizing, and seeing the quality work showcased in the Eppy awards was inspiring. But, as usual, it was the hallway and exhibit floor conversations that were most interesting, especially because it gave me the chance to share with many editors and publishers what DailyMe is doing and how we work with news sites.

One topic that arose occasionally is how we license content for DailyMe. It’s a question we’re happy to discuss with news producers, because we believe the approach we take at DailyMe benefits both the creators of content as well as the users of DailyMe, and in the process increases the audience for good journalism.

Unlike the numerous aggregator sites that scrape original news sites and offer their publishers little in return except the occasional click back, DailyMe pays for content it licenses through consolidators and wire services. Much of the license fee we pay flows back to the original publishers, providing them with an additional revenue stream from their content. In most cases, the user reading a story on DailyMe would not have gone to the publisher’s site and found that story, so the publisher is not losing traffic that might otherwise have gone to its own site.

DailyMe users benefit because they can discover and consume some of the best news reporting available all in one easy-to-use interface that can be personalized to their interests. Our users can even have their DailyMe digest printed in a convenient format.

I’m looking forward to finding even more ways to work with top news publishers as DailyMe expands.

-Neil