The collaborative space of blogs and newspapers

Technorati has just announced a deal with Associated Press (AP) that will place a “top five most blogged about” list of stories on more than 440 media sites – many of them local newspapers. In addition, they will place a feature of “who’s blogging about” the story for the AP stories that appear on the local sites. This feature was first introduced by the Washington Post last year, when I wrote about “the cycle of media” which this enables. These features both allow readers to know what other people find the most interesting from everything in the mainstream media, and to immediately see and engage in the conversation stemming from those articles. More recently I wrote about the symbiosis of mainstream media and blogs. Newspapers and other mainstream media are still the primary reference points for what’s happening in the world, and the first pass of editorial commentary on that. Yet mainstream media increasingly feeds off the dialogue and news that surfaces in the blogosphere. News sites are also vastly enhanced by having the conversations that stem from their articles being visible to all. Anyone who wants to comment on a media story can have their thoughts available to readers globally, not just on a single site, but through an entire world of syndicated media. This move is particularly important as it is not just on a single newspaper, but covering the links that hit a story at any point in the news syndication process. Technorati’s initiatives – and their uptake by mainstream media – are making the system into a tightly enmeshed collaborative space for identifying and disseminating news through society.