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Microsoft Developing News Sorting Based On Political Bias
wiredog writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Microsoft is developing a program that classifies news stories according to whether liberal or conservative bloggers are linking to them and also measures the 'emotional intensity' based on the frequency of keywords in the blog posts." If you would like to jump right to the tool you can check out "Blews" on the Microsoft site.
Hear, hear to the parent. "Conservative" and "Liberal" have come more and more to mean two sides of the same Remocrat/Depublican coin.
They're both wealth-destroying Socialists. They're both warmongering Fascists.
And leave it to Microsoft to place a flawed concept at the very center of the design. "Click the Red Elephant of you listen to Rush, or the Blue Donkey if you listen to Air America"
Yes... just one more reason I'm an anarcocapitalist.Part of the Second American Revolution!
You're not trusting microsoft's anything. The people who write this code are experts in their respective fields, who so happen to be on a microsoft payroll. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer didn't get together over a lunch and write a list of what they decree to be republican or democrat. The shareholders don't vote on what should be included in which column. This is not representative of microsoft, just paid for and owned by microsoft. True making them red or blue might be a silly squeeze, but the fact is that the readers will identify with that sort of sentiment. Look at the Red State/Blue State maps that everyone makes and looks at on TV. Anyway, it's just an experimental thingy, like any other. Deserves the same respect any other experiment does, even if you don't go try to formulate a business model based on its findings.
Speak for yourself.
Indeed. Local news has a frighteningly powerful impact upon local culture (at least for a certain.... and typically extremely vocal segment of the population).
The ones that always surprise me, however, are the British tabloids. They're not quite (nearly( as bad as American tabloids, and are therefore taken quite seriously by some, which is troubling to say the least. The Sun, and The Scottish Daily Mail come to mind as being two such papers.
Move a step up to papers like The Guardian and The Times, and journalistic standards still aren't quite up to what you'd expect from a top-tier news organization. (The Times, however, is probably the least tainted of Rupert Murdoch's properties, especially in recent years)
Perhaps it's simply a reflection of my own views, but I have a bit more respect for papers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, who do a somewhat better job covering global events, and tend to do considerably less cherrypicking with their stories.
Oh, and of course, the BBC and NPR are both quite good, both being considerably less driven by ratings and sales than their commercial competitors.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It doesn't seem very new or interesting to me. But then I don't think politics really fit into the "liberal"/"conservative" thing.
I thought something like The Circle[1] would work much better for something like this. It's postings were sorted by a trust based system, so the more you trusted someone, the closer to the top their posts would appear, and you could rate each post as well. Supposedly Advogato's site uses it to, but there membership is closed, so I haven't seen it in action. Their Trust Metric system is described at www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html. Though it seems to be more centralized than the Cicle's system was.
Though I suppose it would require too much processing for a centralized web server with a large userbase to handle.
[1] I don't know what happened to the Circle project--I think their site was thecircle.org.au
Probably the only tabloid I've ever read was the Weekly World News, and that one was sufficiently far from anything that resembled reality, that you'd have to be pretty screwed up to believe any of its articles to be factual. But it was a pretty good read and usually hilarious.
OTOH, that explains all the lawsuits I've heard about recently targeting the Scottish Daily Mail.
> The Sun
Which, by the way, along with Fox News and the brand-new european front Sky News are all part of the Murdoch Empire.
+5, Truth
Honestly, ElizabethGreene's comment just isn't very interesting. It's part "lol micro$oft" and part tinfoil hat. It's also horribly ungrammatical ("This is the most interesting and !new! ideas"? Come on. Try.)
There's no reason Elizabeth's comment should be modded up just for her being a girl. Psycho's is a lot more interesting, and, you know, readable.
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