The Copenhagen Project

Techmeme and Google News shares an interesting common characteristic: They are both entirely edited by algorithms that surveil a predefined list of other medias to determine what’s currently ”hot news”, and it uses this information to construct it’s front-page. The two sites are virtually functioning in the same way with one other important difference: Techmeme isn’t prioritized whereas Google News is, and Techmeme therefore ‘feels’ more blog-like.

Notice that out model holds these two sites as having the property of ”Editors” (Or as I called it originally: Centralized editing). It could maybe seem as if this should be ”voting” or ”decentralized editing” as the sites draws on data from a great number of sites – but the thought behind this property is not to tell on basis of which data the editing is decided, but where ”the power” in the editorial decisions resides. Bloggers that are included in the list of Techmeme’s sites aren’t consciously trying to influence the editing process of Techmeme, neither are the list of medias that Google News use. Users don’t have the power to tweak the algorithms behind the sites and therefore can’t influence what’s on the front-page in the same way users of e.g. Digg can do.

We might have to change the name of this property to make it more obvious what it’s all about – as e.g. voting isn’t the only way that users can participate directly in editing of a site. Structurally Techmeme and Google News are very much alike. What remains is the differences in the topical focus of the sites.

The only fundamental difference that’s left is the possibility for users to customize their Google News front-page – an aspect our model doesn’t yet take into account. We might add the properties ”Customizable content” vs. ”Fixed content” to the model.