A cool experiment in election group-blogging and linking
Along with a few other Tennessee bloggers, I've been invited to participate in an experiment in covering the Tennessee primary on Tuesday. This group of bloggers will spend the next several days bookmarking and annotating news stories, blog posts, and other interesting content about the Tennessee primary, and we'll collect them in such a way that they're publicly available to everyone. Scott Karp of Publish2 made the announcement today (cross-posted here); he explains the concept:
Publish2 is organizing a network of newsrooms, journalists, freelancers and network-affiliated bloggers to aggregate the best news coverage of the "Super Tuesday" February 5 U.S. primary elections, leading up to it and after.
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Publish2’s web-based bookmarking feature will aggregate bookmarks from all participants, which can then be published on their sites with headline links and brief descriptions. Think Digg + del.icio.us, syndicated, with a defined group of users, rather than an open free-for-all (which can be gamed).
Jack Lail had this to say about it:
Just four days ago I got an email from Scott Karp suggesting that his Web startup might have some tools that could make covering an election interesting -- really interesting.
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Here's how it'll work at the Tennessee level. A group of excellent bloggers and a couple of journalists who should know better have started collecting links to interesting articles and blog postings on the Tennessee election. You'll soon see the results as a headline list of links that will update as new items are "bookmarked."
Think of it as a list of the best things people have found to read about the Tennessee primary because that's exactly what it is.
I agree with Jack: this should make for an interesting experiment. The participants for the Tennessee coverage are Jack Lail, Michael Silence, Randy Neal, Newscoma, Joe Powell, Ben Cunningham, Bob Krumm, Les Jones, and me. The eight of us pretty much span the political spectrum from one end to the other.
The items that the eight of us tag and annotate will be collected on Publish2 here under the "tnelection" tag. Within the next couple of days, I should have a widget in the sidebar with a feed of the most recently tagged items, and all the other participating sites probably will as well.
I think this is a fascinating way to collect up-to-the-minute content focused on a specific topic and delivered through multiple channels. This should be fun.