The Headlines – 7th Oct.

As Election Day looms, the Democrats are predictably trying to maximize the circumstancial advantage of the economic crisis; what I mean by “predictably” is the less-than-surprising fact that McCain’s involvement in the “Keating five” scandal of 1989 has been reheated, put into parallel with the current situation, and used as a campaign topic.

(Some network trouble has been disrupting the orderly headline-sampling; apologies for the missing entries. At the moment I’m also wrestling with studies of methodology.)

The Headlines – 1st Oct. 2008

In a way it’s reassuring that the 2nd most popular item yesterday on Propeller was a blogpost about beautiful (indeed they are) autumn pictures from Switzerland. Apart from that, business is as usual on the social news sites; headlines after the jump.

The Headlines – 30th Sept.

Once again without much commentary: the leatest leading headlines from Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and Propeller. The rejected bailout-bill captured most of the readers’ attention, it seems.

Weekend headlines – 27th – 29th Sept.

After the hectic leadup to last Friday’s debate of the presidential candidates, the exchange itself proved – well, I think the best word is – ordinary. Here is a transcript (courtesy of CNN); if I get ’round to it, I might look into it somewhat deeper (but that’s quite an “if”). The weekend’s headlines: after the jump.

The Headlines – 26th Sept.

…this time with no comment at all, just in a field-note-for-myself style.

The Headlines – 25th Sept.

The breaking news of the day is that McCain proposed to postpone Friday’s TV-debate (the first out of four scheduled for this campaign), so that he “would be able to focus on the economy” instead of campaign matters. The news is on the front page of Digg (albeit NOT in the “Elections” but in the more general “Politics” section), it’s also there on Reddit, and Newsvine covers also Obama’s reply to the suggestion on the front page.

Speaking of technical matters, Digg’s blog hinted yesterday that significant changes are to be expected from the site, along the lines of better – increased – personalization, and localization of content. Whether or not this is a good business decision, I have no idea, but I’m guessing those in charge know what they are doing. On the other hand, from the point of view of deliberative democracy, I tend to agree with Sunstein – too much filtering (aka “personalization”) is detrimental. We’ll see soon enough. The headlines, then:

The Headlines – 24th Sept.

“Bailout” is definitely becoming the word of the week; and Propeller keeps on offering a, well, interestingly different selection from the news crop. Here are the latest headlines from the social news sites.

The Headlines – 23rd Sept.

One thing you might not realize from the headlines here is that I list them here in a slightly modified form: especially on Digg, it is customary to add to the end of the title something like “view!” or “watch!”, or, in the case of audio, “listen!”. In Reddit, images are often indicated with their title ending with “PIC” or “IMAGE” or something similar.

I suspect this practice has a strong influence on what gets to the front page. A picture is worth 1000 words, or so it is said – in any case, it’s much faster to “consume” a single image than a 1000-word article, and consequently, it’s assumed to be easier for an image to get votes than – especially a long – article. Which is what is likely to be behind yesterday’s leading article on both Digg and Reddit. The topic itself (“elitism”) is relatively old and has not much currency at the moment in the mainstream media.

The headlines – 18th Sept.

I think the most interesting item on today’s front pages is a finding by Reddit on Politico; about a soon-to-be-launched ad by Barack Obama. Again, a likely contender for the front page of Digg, too – maybe tomorrow.

The headlines – 11th – 17th Sept.

Apologies. I have been away for a couple of days – a short trip to Vilnius. But now I’m back to work – and here are the headlines I missed. In not-so-related news, I have just received the copy of Chantal Mouffe’s “On The Political” which I ordered a while ago. I find her ideas about an “agonistic” public sphere intriguing; so I hope I will soon have the time to get better acquainted with them.