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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.
Because we all know that the most effective way to be informed is by only talking with and listening to people you already agree with. /sarcasm
Politics aren't nearly partisan enough, Microsoft has to go and encourage further escalation of tensions between the radical left and right. Get your free tub of Microsoft Popcorn(TM) while it's hot!
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
This new project highlights the absurdity of our two party system and past media inadequacies. The whole world is reduced to two schools of thought "conservative" and "liberal" with an additional dimension for "emotion". This is perfect for the manufactured consent way of doing things where issues are displayed without depth and championed by more or less annoying, emotional "experts". Rational thought is completely cut off, because anything outside of the "mainstream" represented by the extremes is automatically smeared as the unworkable product of starry eyed idealists or terrorists. So, the complexity of the real world is eliminated and policy is made by those controlling the media. The correct opinion for the good little sheeple will be found right in the middle of the pretty, Vista style chart.
No thanks, Microsoft, I'll keep reading blogs and thinking for myself. MSNBC never showed me where the good ones were and I doubt they will in the future. You can't run an honest search engine, so there's no way in hell I'll trust your company to tell me how to vote.
Will pro M$ stuff be pushed up? Pro vista stuff filled with PR talk will be push over real stories from uses.
This is a substitute for analysis like a big mac is a substitute for food. The world is far more intersting than a three column spreadsheet and there are always more than two ways to look at any issue. Trusting Microsoft's choice of events and opinions is a sure way to remain ignorant and be guided like sheep to the traditional media slaughter.
Google does a much better job by scraping titles and sentences coherently. Especially important is their people involved feedback. Trying to force all of that into "Democrat" and "Republican" is worse than useless, it's misleading and that's why Google never did it.
People on the both sides believe what they believe and self select evidence that fits their world view, and rejects any evidence to the contrary as lies and propaganda. The purpose of creating or reading a political blog is to get a feeling of belonging with other people agreeing with what you believe.
Thats why I love slashdot. There are a million idiots, trolls, and very smart people that will challenge anything I say on any topic under the sun. No sacred cows. minimal censorship.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
but you won't find those opinions reflected in broadcast news. Try fitting this or this into the "just like the tories" box. Want to bet neither of those two bloggers ever show up in blews? Blews, like broadcast media before it, represents nothing but the will of it's corporate masters. Readers are spoon fed shallow "stories" and false choices that drive public policy in favor of those pulling the strings.
Doesn't NBC already have a patent on this?
Seriously though, every news outlet in the world has been doing this since before Gutenberg was born. Even Microsoft's idea to tailor it to each user dynamically isn't new. That's been done towards anyone who could have you executed since pre-historic days. Didn't they just rule that making an old idea available over the Internet was not sufficient to receive a patent?
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Great, software that will make people more close minded, less informed, and just generally less intelligent. Oh wait, did you say it came from Microsoft?
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Sorting news as "liberal" or "conservative"... because there isn't already enough false dichotomization of people's views in modern politics. As long as this keeps up, we're ideologically locking ourselves into a two-party system.