Technology / Computers

When ordinary citizens complain about the titans of media abusing their power to shape public opinion, the complaint often revolves around the placement of a news item, not the story’s content. There may be no journalistic judgment call more crucial than the simple one of location: what story gets front-page treatment and what gets demoted to a short in the back of the D section. Until recently these decisions have been made by professional news editors. Now, however, the power to declare what news is most important is being eroded by the Internet. Dozens of online services allow you to create your own personalized front page with headlines arranged according to your interests—what some have dubbed the Daily Me.

Critics worry that so narrowly tailoring news to an individual’s interests could ultimately create an ideological hall of mirrors, with right-wingers reading only about the latest abuses by the teachers union and the ACLU, the left-wingers seeing nothing but stories about corporate greed and John Ashcroft. Just in time, an alternative to the echo chamber of the Daily Me has emerged. Instead of personalizing headlines to an individual’s taste, a new generation of online services track the interests of hundreds of thousands of ordinary users, building a front page from their collective interests. Call it the Daily Us.

Illustration by Leo Espinosa

The emergence of these metaheadline sites raises a fascinating question: How is the news different when it is organized collectively by readers, not editors? Does it follow a race-to-the-bottom pattern, with tabloid intrigue and celebrity stalking dominating? Or does something more promising rise to the top? To answer that question, I spent a week analyzing a Web site called Technorati (www.technorati.com), comparing its headlines with the traditional ones served up by The New York Times and CNN.

Created almost as a whim by programmer David L. Sifry, Technorati is one of the sites that tracks links and commentary in the expanding world of Web logs, called blogs for short. Blogs are maintained by individuals, usually in their spare time. Most are composed of links to other Web pages, often with a dash of commentary attached. A Web logger, or blogger, will see an interesting item on the Middle East peace accords from Reuters, then post a link to it on his blog, adding a few sentences of endorsement or critique. Some bloggers update their sites dozens of times a day.

Technorati began as an exercise in high-tech navel-gazing. Sifry wanted to have a better way of knowing when other bloggers wrote about something from Sifry’s Alerts—his blog. So he built a tracking tool that scans Web logs, looking for links pointing back to Sifry’s Alerts. Then Sifry decided it would be interesting to track new links to other Web logs instead of just his own. At last count, Technorati was scanning the activity of more than 900,000 blogs, following more than 40 million active links.

Sifry uses the ever-changing links to compile a Daily Us that he calls Technorati Breaking News. “It’s pretty simple,” he says. “Imagine that each Web logger Technorati tracks is voting with his attention whenever he posts to his Web log. We track all of these people’s writings and treat each blogger as part of a massive collaborative news filter. There are about 4,500 professional news sources that Technorati has compiled on the Web, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, and The Weekly World News. Whenever a Web logger links to a new article on one of those sources, that article gets a vote. When a new article gets at least three votes from different Web loggers, it goes on Technorati Breaking News.”