The news that Daylife — the social news-aggregator that Jeff Jarvis is involved with, and craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark has helped financially — has gotten a second round of funding is an optimistic note for the idea of social news, although I’m not quite sure Daylife is there yet (or Newsvine, or Gather.com for that matter). Ashkan Karbasfrooshan says he thinks the perfect media product for the 21st century would be a mix of Techmeme, Digg and Topix.com (which doesn’t get as much attention as I think it deserves).

I think he’s probably right, in the sense that all of those use some combination of “crowdsourcing” and editors/moderators, along with some algorithms (or robots). And that’s why I would argue that when it comes to Stan Schroeder’s question at Mashable — Who Will Bring Us News: Robots, Crowds, or Editors? — the answer should be: All of the above.

Digg takes links that people submit and lets users vote, and also uses algorithms to help determine what gets to the front page; Gabe Rivera uses an algorithm at Techmeme.com, but also tweaks it himself constantly, using his dark geek magic :-) I think it makes sense to use readers as a resource — either to submit news links, or vote on them, or rank them based on clicks or comments, or some combination of all three — but it is also important to have editors who make judgments as well, and algorithms to smooth the process. It doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) just one or the other.

I missed the big rush of posts that hit Techmeme about the launch of Daylife yesterday, but from what I can gather just about everyone — including Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, a prominent investor in the project — is underwhelmed by it, if that’s a word (gratuitous Sloan reference). I wonder if the next shareholders’ meeting is going to be a little frosty :-)

Paul Montgomery of Tinfinger says that he thinks Mike’s response could have something to do with his well-publicized dislike of the New York Times, which is a lead investor in the site, and Paul also notes — as do other blogs that have looked at Daylife — that mainstream-media content is featured awfully prominently on the site. In which case, why not use Topix or Newsvine or even Google News?

Some of the only kind words have come from Steve Rubel, who says in a response to a comment on his post that we should “put on our anti-geek glasses” and see it from the point of view of someone who doesn’t read Techmeme or visit dozens of blogs a day. Which is a fair point, but again I have to ask why we wouldn’t point someone like that to Topix or Newsvine or Google News.

I think a big part of the problem is that Daylife has been in stealth or development mode for a year or more, and it has some pretty high-profile people involved, including Jeff Jarvis — who seems to be taking all the criticism pretty well so far — as well as Craig Newmark, Dave Winer and the NYT. So I think the expectation was that when it launched it would be significantly different than Newsvine and Topix and so on. And it’s not.

Does that mean it won’t ever be any good? Hardly. From what Jeff says, more improvements are planned (including RSS, which does seem like a pretty major hole), so I’m willing to wait and see how the site develops. I hope it finds a way to add more interaction — comments, blogs and so on — in an interesting way. We could use some more experimentation in that department, and Jeff has the chops to be able to deliver it.

More commentary comes from David Weinberger at Hyperorg, Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0, Rex Hammock, Liz Gannes at Gigaom and Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests. And for a totally unvarnished and skeptical take, as usual, watch a video review from the inimitable Loren Feldman of 1938media.