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.

Comments

Re:Oh come on.

[aldousd666]

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.