The Copenhagen Project

The Issue is a daily updated news site, a ‘blog newspaper’, that consists of links to blog posts. The Issue describes itself:

“The Issue is a non-partisan blog newspaper that provides a window to an emerging world of diverse and informed opinions. We cull the blogosphere for its wise insights, probing analyses, and diverse perspectives, drawing together a borderless newspaper. By combining the democratization and diversity of new media with the format and editorial standards of traditional news, we hope to offer a hybrid news source that provides the best of both worlds.”

The site focus each day on a new issue, e.g. this issue of the EU-African summit. The editors pick different perspectives on that issue from around the blogosphere and then invite it’s users to discuss it. This is how the site is analyzed according to our model:

This is how Wikipedia describes The Drudge Report:

“The Drudge Report is a U.S.-based news aggregation website run by Matt Drudge. The site consists primarily of links to stories from the US and international mainstream media about politics, entertainment, and current events as well as links to many popular columnists. Occasionally Drudge authors news stories himself. The Report originated around 1994 as a weekly subscriber-based email dispatch. It is most famous for being the first news source to break the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the public after Newsweek killed the story.”

Here is a break-down of The Drudge Report according to our model:

The Drudge Report is a link media in it’s most extreme sense. The value provided is not content or participation, but simply up-to-the-minute monitoring of news sites and selection of quality content.

According to the site’s own statistics it has 15+ million page views (there’s only one page) per day - the actual number of visitors is probably lower, as the page reloads automatically every three minutes. Still, it’s a high number when it’s taking into account that the site is edited by a small group of people, and this quote (source) by Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, Jr. speaks for itself: “Our largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge“.

Wikinews is a media entirely produced and edited by it’s users. Articles is developed in a separate section in the same way as Wikipedia-articles. The articles are moved to the front page when there is consensus among the users that articles are finished.

Wikinews is probably the most open type of media out there, and it’s impressive that it seems to work quite well, even though the amount of participating users should be higher before it would be a useful news resource. For now it’s an interesting experiment and a demonstration of how relatively simple and freely available tools as wiki-software actually can work.

Reddit is a link media where users submit links and vote on submissions. An algorithm determines how far up on the front page an item should be placed based on both the number of votes the item has received and on how long time the item has been on the site.

An item with a lot of votes that has been online for a short period of time is prioritized very high. As the ratio between votes and time changes, the item is moved down in prioritization until it has completely left the front page. Links can therefore move up and down during the day, and the front page is ever changing. While some links may stay on the front page for only a few hours, other links may stay for days.

Twitter is a micro blogging service. If we look at an individual user page and regard the user as the “owner” of it’s own micro blog, our analysis looks like this:

Do we regard Twitter as a tool or do we regard it as a media?

If we look at it from a user perspective, Twitter is a tool that enables users to run their own micro blog. In this regard Twitter in itself is just a tool (Like  WordPress and any other CMS), while the final result of using the tool - each individual micro blog - is a media.

This is also true at other services, e.g. del.icio.us, which is first of all a tool that enables users to run their own link media. But the people behind del.icio.us has decided to also run their own media - the front page of del.icio.us (see post). The front page media and the individual user pages (here’s mine) are two different types of medias, while the whole service is a tool - a CMS for links.