The Copenhagen Project

Distributed editing and centralised editing

A media can be edited by a central group of people, e.g. the editorial board of The New York Times or by the author behind a blog. The editing is restricted to a set group of people, or in the case of algorithms, on a set rule of filtering where no conscious outer influence is possible.

The opposite of centralised editing is what I think is best coined in the term “distributed editing”. By this I mean that the editing process has been opened up to outer conscious influence in some way or another. An example is digg.com, newstrust.net and others, where the editing is done by the community in a system of voting and rating.

Thoughts

This is not two definitions set in stone. digg.com uses algorithms to determine which items are promoted to the frontpage, but as the main determiner is the userbased votes I would label it a media that has distributed editing. techmeme.com on the other hand has centralized editing, as it determines it’s news on the items, that a chosen group of weblogs link to. The authors of these weblogs aren’t consciously trying to influence whether a story hits techmeme.com or not. Another example of centralised editing based on measuring is the del.icio.us-frontpage.

Analysis

The New York Times: Centralised editing
del.icio.us: Centralised editing
jezebel.com: Centralised editing
boingboing.com: Centralised
newstrust.org: Distributed editing
Monocle Magazine: Centralised editing
reddit.com: Distributed editing
digg.com: Distributed editing
technorati.com: Centralised editing
techmeme.com: Centralised editing
Google News: Centralised editing
daylife.org: Centralised editing
Newsblogger: Centralised editing
huffingtonpost.com: Centralised editing
talkingpointsmemo.com: Centralised editing
RSS reader: -

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • Netscape
  • NewsVine

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Jeppe Kabell
Jeppe Kabell
Researcher
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal
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