The Copenhagen Project

Human editing means that the main selection and prioritization of content or links on a media is done by a group of people. This group can range from 1 person at e.g. a personal blog to a unlimited number of users at a site as e.g. Digg.com.

Algorithmic editing means that the selection and prioritization on a media is done without any humans directly involved in the process. Humans only decide the basic rules and properties of the program, e.g. which list of publications to monitor and how the algorithm weights different stories based on e.g. the number of links the story has from the blogosphere, how many sources that brings the same story etc.

Thoughts

Some medias based on user powered editing also utilize some kind of algorithmic editing. At digg.com it’s not only the number of votes that decides whether an item makes it to the front page, but also a number of other factors, unknown to the public. Still, though, the editing is mainly done by the community, and is therefore first and foremost edited by humans.

Analysis

The New York Times: Human
del.icio.us: Human
jezebel.com: Human
boingboing.com: Human
newstrust.org: Human
Monocle Magazine: Human
reddit.com: Human
digg.com: Human
technorati.com: Alghorithmic
techmeme.com: Alghorithmic
Google News: Alghorithmic
daylife.org: Alghorithmic
Newsblogger: Human
huffingtonpost.com: Human
talkingpointsmemo.com: Human
RSS reader: Human / Alghoritmic