Oh, I do like this.
Spin Profiles is an “encyclopedia of people, issues, and groups shaping the public agenda that is being written collaboratively”. It’s a wiki and anyone can add info to it – there are editors exercising some control. Info is divided into portals e.g. “Nuclear Spin“.
Best bit, and presumably the point of the project, is the individual profiles of people involved in “message control”. As an example, here’s the page on our old friend David Capitanchik, who I first wrote about in the wake of the July 2005 bombings in London. The page graphs his presence in the media, details his links to elements of the power structure, and details his publication record during his academic career (a rather light record of three peer-reviewed journal publications in 25+ years!).
The project’s editor (and, presumably, initiator) is one Claire Robinson* who seems to have first started walking in the world of govt lobbying and opinion shaping by fighting against genetically modified foods (which is an interesting issue to get started on because of sharp opinion divides within the leftosphere).
This is a great resource and I know I’m going to be coming back to this one in future. Decoding the identities and agendas of the people who turn up in TV, radio and newspapers is often tricky, and this will help a great deal with making sense of the noise. (We could definitely do with an NZ verion, but the task would be much smaller as our media commentariat at the moment seems to consist solely of Russell Brown, Finlay McDonald and Cameron Slater.)
* note: not the NZ political communications specialist Claire Robinson, who comes from an academic background; this is a UK Claire Robinson who comes from a freelance journo background. These Claire Robinsons get up to all sorts of trouble.