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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.
I would find it much more interesting to read the opposing viewpoint. I already know what mine is.
This is reinforcing old patterns by selective presentation of opinions, just like traditional media. Such simplification looks stale when you look around for yourself because no real issue can be pie charted so easily. Trying to stuff every issue into a single page with three columns and an emotion depth is almost as dumb as trying to wrap the world up into a 15 minute CNN loop. It can only give an illusion of knowing something to the most ignorant and opinionated of people.
I know what my viewpoint is. I also know what the opposing viewpoint is. Why would I read news from the opposing viewpoint when it just ticks me off?
It's interesting to read the local newspapers of the different parts of the world (LA Times, California, West Coast), (Toronto Star, Canada), (New York Times, New York, East Coast).
The LA Times always seems to have these stories with a rich person/poor people theme (gentrification/regeneration of downtown creates homes for wealthy people, but displaces the Mexican community, another story is high school with swimming pool won't let local kids use it during summer holidays). The Toronto Star seems to have these stories where the local politicians are always present when some Hell's Angels den is being busted (even though it was already vacant for months). Scottish newspapers (Edinburgh News,Evening Express) alway seem to have stories about travellers blocking up road lay-bys, park-and-ride zones and city parks. English newspapers alway seem to have stories about people being arrested and jailed for tackling burglars, or anyone refusing to pay their council tax out of poverty gets thrown into jail, while the burglars get hours of commmunity service (Tabloids).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
And for as much as you don't like the two party system, voting in this country is pretty linear -- you get to choose exactly one candidate for each job, and all those jobs are tied to geographic regions only. Nobody's come up with a two-dimensional model of government, but I could imagine just how interesting that would be.
The House of Representatives would have to be sliced up into issues, instead of geographic regions. You'd vote for dozens of different representatives: a Transportation candidate, a Ways and Means candidate, an Ethics candidate, a Defense candidate, and so on. That way you wouldn't have to worry if your Defense candidate was pro-life or pro-choice, because they'd never cast a vote on the subject. It'd force a complete change how bills get written: they'd have to be categorized, shopped around differently, it'd actually be quite refreshing.
(Oh, God, now I'm refactoring Congress! Somebody help me get Martin Fowler out of my head!!!)
John
>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
And yet you're here on Slashdot?
I was a little thrown off by their choice of colours. Up here in Canada the Tories(Conservatives) are always blue and its the Grits(Liberals) who take Red.
The odd fact is that it is the liberals who proclaim to speak in the name of reason and the conservatives that proclaim to speak in the name of religion-based morality. While the reality is that the best publication from which to get a conservative view point is Reason(tm) and the best publication from which to get a liberal view point is the New Testament. The "pundits" on both sides no longer discuss ideas. They both attack personalities.
"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." -Eleanor Roosevelt
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I'd be more interested in what they filtered out...
I disagree strongly with Murdoch's world view but I give him credit for openly admitting he pushes that view through his papers. People who swallow the crap he dishes up are either like minded or only have themselves to blame. IMHO Google news is one of the best aggragator's, if reading two opposing papers from (say) Isreal and the Arab world you will notice a difference in factual reporting of an event. This doesn't mean either is lying, but each paper is definitely selective in the detail they report.
As for blogs and editorials, well lets just say everone has an opinion.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Read Maslow. Part of the democratization of the Internet is that we permit on the troglodyte. Your gender is a part of your self. Every portion of your self must be defended or anonomized. That's part of the game. Deal with it or play on a different field.
The best course is to ignore them. If you can't bring yourself to do that, being the naughty geek girl that despises them for their level of fail can be a satisfying substitute.
/has three geek girls of his own. Tells them to have gender neutral ID's like his.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm reminded of the New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."
This program apparently scans the blogosphere... but I wonder what that is. Is that the web? If I just have a page that expresses an opinion, is it counted as a blog, or do I have to register it somewhere as a blog? Is an RSS feed required at a site, or on the page, to be a blog? Does the word blog have to appear in the header or are "essays" counted? And if I have more than one domain name, how is that counted? Does the text have to be different in two cases in order to be counted as two opinions? How does one distinguish two distinct people who merely word things like an advocacy group told them from one person who owns two (or fifty or a thousand) sites and puts the same text on all of them? Is the site careful to understand the difference between quotation and inclusion for critique? How much are they investing in tools that allow people to detect and correct misclassification or is this "all in good fun" and "for entertainment only"?
Perhaps the answers to these are documented, but that almost doesn't matter. The point is that however they're answered, the answer is arbitrarily chosen and are not The Truth no matter how they are chosen.
In the olden days, everyone had an opinion on things, but the opinions were distributed, and people were forced to engage each other interactively in order to discover other opinions. They might agree or disagree, but it was the conversation that caused them to grow and learn. In the new world, we can count how many total opinions there are, and avoid ever talking to someone who disagrees. This takes the dialog and growth part out of the equation. At that point, what difference does it make how many people agree or disagree, since we'll just be measuring the efficiency of the cloning process, not the validity of ideas.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Mark Twain
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
How do they classify the bloggers as "liberal" or "conservative"? Self-identification? And is the data even meaningful with such a simple dichotomy? What about radical Jeffersonians? Anarcho-socialists? People who still vote for Nader?
Because sometimes, regardless of which side you favor, your side is lying about something.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."