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).

There’s a huge opportunity to help voters find the best election coverage in the sea of election content. Yeah, you can do it by yourself — but on the web, the larger the network, the more influential the linking — time to break down those traditional media silos.

And, yes, February 5 is less than a week away — but news organizations can’t afford for innovation to have long lead times. As Yoni Greenabum wrote, “We need to be more nimble, more aggressive; we need to be quicker to act and even quicker to react.”

Jack Lail of jacklail.com and KnoxNews.com took the lead on this idea — we hammered out the technology requirements and he’s been recruiting folks in TN — all in the last 36 hours. I bounced it off Bill Densmore to do it with the New England News Forum, he called me back an hour later, and we were off to the races.

Here’s how it works for a newsroom:

• Round up a group a editors, journalists, and freelancers or affiliated bloggers (e.g. part of your blogger network — we’re aiming to balance left and right)
• Get them all to register for a free Publish2 account — http://publish2.com/register
• Get them to install our browser bookmarklet or toolbar — http://beta.publish2.com/install
• Agree on a common tag, e.g. KnoxNews.com is using “tnelection”
• Starting this weekend and running through next week, get everyone to bookmark interesting election coverage — from ANY source — for your state or from around the country
• Makes sure everyone uses the common tag on their bookmarks (along with any others)
• Publish2 generates feeds of headlines for each tag
• We’ll give you some javascript to publish the headlines on your site — our just take the feeds yourself

Let me know if your newsroom is interested, and we’ll provide support — but you can just do it.

Jack Lail had a great way to describe this in brief — a group link blog.

Here’s Bill Densmore’s description for New England News Forum (if you’re in New England and want to participate through the NENF, you can register here):

Help create a comprehensive source of up-to-the-minute news and commentary on “Super Tuesday.” The New England News Forum is co-ordinating a network of serious news folks — MSM and online/blog/independent — to use Publish2′s online bookmarking tool to submit links to important news and posts leading up to and including Massachusetts and Connecticut “Super Tuesday” primaries. Publish2 will aggregate these links and create RSS feeds that you can then put on your site. Instant aggregation, without the fuss.

“No fuss.” That’s the idea.

You can also think of it as a form of Beat Blogging.

If you’re outside the U.S. covering the election, we’d LOVE to have an international perspective.

If you’re a journalist or freelancer covering politics, and want to participate on your own (perhaps to provide a demonstration for your newsroom), just register and do it. You can use the “2008 U.S. Elections” topic and any tags you want.

Will it work? I dunno. It’s an experiment. We’re in beta. I could have called a committee meeting to commission a study into whether it will work.

Instead we decided to JUST DO IT.

Could we have benefited from more time to plan this on our end? Probably. (Just remembered we need to get the “2008 U.S. Elections” topic in place!) But sometimes you’ve just got to act and lead by example (AKA eat your own dog food).

And we intend to learn from it, continue through the rest of the primary season, conventions, and hopefully keep it going right through November. So if you don’t have time to get involved for Tuesday, this will be ongoing.

Outside of the elections, if you’re interested in connecting your newsroom to the Publish2 network, let me know — it’s free! Email me at scott.karp (at) publish2 (dot) com

Here’s an overview of the concept: http://blog.publish2.com/editors-newsrooms/

And remember — on the web, the power is in the NETWORK.

Then, names like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us emerged as virtual town squares that became a way to measure the pulse of what the web community finds most newsworthy, most captivating, or just amusing.

Here’s how the BBC casts it:

A news agenda formulated by citizens would be radically different from that put together by journalists

The problem is that a very small percentage of Digg’s and Reddit’s “citizens” control the news on the site — very much like a group of traditional editors. They may not be “professionals,” but they are acting as a traditional editorial hierarchy.

Here’s an analysis I did earlier this year of Digg’s top users:

It turns out that only the top 2,457 Digg users have gotten 3 or more stories to the homepage, putting them in the top 0.35% of Digg’s 707,593 registered users. And only the top 1,662 Digg users have gotten 4 or more stories to the homepage, putting them in the top 0.23%. Even more telling is what you get if you graph even just the top 250 Digg users — can you guess? Of course, it’s a long tail:

The irony of the report’s title subtitle — “Your Vote Counts” — is that for most users of Digg and Reddit, their vote actually doesn’t count much in determining which stories get attention. Both sites actually have algorithms that count the votes of successful, active users — i.e. the de facto editors — more (often MUCH more) than someone who just signed up for an account today.

The other issue, which the report does address to a limited degree, is that audience for Digg and Reddit is principally young, male, tech enthusiasts (with a dash of puerile interest) — the “users” or “citizens” of these sites are in NO way representative of the broad, diverse group of mainstream news consumers.

Here’s an example of top stories on Digg that reflects the interests of its highly niche audience:

Digg and Reddit are excellent sites for highly niche communities to share information of common interest. But they are definitely not a way for a general news consumers to find out what’s going on in the world or in topics of interest outside of handful of niche topics:

During that week, the immigration debate led the coverage, accounting for 10% of all news stories in the News Coverage Index. That was followed by coverage of a major fire near Lake Tahoe (6%), the failed bombings in the United Kingdom (6%), events on the ground in Iraq (6%), Supreme Court decisions (5%), the 2008 presidential election (4%), flooding in Texas (4%), the policy debate in the capitol over the war in Iraq (4%), U.S. domestic terrorism (3%), and the missing pregnant woman in Ohio (3%). In all, the top ten stories that week accounted for 51% of all the stories in the Index.

In the user-generated sites, these stories were barely visible. Overall, just 5% of the stories captured on these three sites overlapped with the ten most widely-covered stories in the Index (13% for Reddit, 4% for Digg, and 0% for Del.icio.us).

There is certainly great value in how Digg and Reddit introduce a diversity of sources, which would be particularly valuable if they could broaden the perspective on major stories — but the complete absence of major stories is of little use to mainstream news consumers, even those looking for more diversity of coverage.

While I understand and appreciate what the Project for Excellence in Journalism was trying to test, the comparison is of little value — like observing that Newsweek has very different coverage from PC World or Teen People, i.e. comparing general interest sources to niche sources only demonstrates the difference between general interest and niche.