intro phase 2

in phase 1 we have been approaching towards shrinking cities in a very general way, asking first questions about the nature and phenomenons of shrinking cities, in phase 2 we were developing our basic views in a wider perspective.

if detroit's media-landscape was the key to unfold our approach, we had to define the media-landmarks: in addition to the four corporate "media money machines" television, music, film, and videogames, we were also interested in p2p file sharing, music fraud, music labels, detroit based brands, as well as detroit's media attention profile.

Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the berkman center for internet and society, has developed the method for mapping the media attention given to all the worlds countries, and showing which countries are underexposed in the world media. he helped us by adapting the script to map world cities instead. then he run one test for us, giving us spreadsheets for our graphs. we decided it would be interesting to compare detroit to cities on a global scale.

therefore detroit's data would always be compared with the largest metropolitan areas or cities on each continent, lesser focused booming cities, and a choice of ghost-towns and shrinking cities.

the result show a clear disparity between us/canadian cities and developing world cities. this can be taken into account for by making clear categories and groups of cities.

"google hits/news-items/google-news"

the results for the media attention spreadsheets of cities are based on a set of search engines:

1. BBC - all BBC news sources for the past 5-6 years
2. altavista, google - a search of the 4500 or so news sources covered by news.google.com and news.altavista.com usually the last 14-30 days
3. AP, reuters - search of the AP and reuters newsfeeds for the past 14 days
4. NY post - search of the NYpost newspaper for the past few years
5. NYT,NYTIlong - search of NY times for one week, 90 days respectively
6. washington post - search of the last 14 days of the washington post
7. CNN - all CNN news sources of the past 4 years
8. daypop - search of weblogs indexed by daypop over the last 14 days.

after the first try with the analyzing model for our choice of cities, as mentioned above, we were recommended by Ethan Zuckerman to do the next "run" with a choice of about 200 cities to get more precise results...