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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.
Microsoft is the best software maker in the world! ..and now to Jeff for the weather..
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
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
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.
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.
Come on, that's just too obvious a joke for /.
Like emacs vs. vim?
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.
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.
I can guarantee there are going to be some false positives in links to blogs about people loving bush
Excuse me while I gather the virgin sacrifice and assemble the pentagram required to solve your problem
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
Now this exactly the sort of bias that this thing finds: republic vs democratic, yin vs yang, sucks vs blows.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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
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.
In other news, the democrats, with the inventor of the Internet, developed a system that automatically makes any republican text display in white on a white background, so that it is impossible to read.
Let's test this software:
In a meeting today, Bush said, "
."
See, the system is working.
I'd be more interested in what they filtered out...
I guess this means that we can expect some form of "Blews" Screen of Death
Cheers, Chris
Replyiing twice to the same post is bad form but I feel I must.
Once I was employed at a major chip vendor's technology development lab that was being downsized. A coworker suggested I might find work at Microsoft.
My reply: My local septic tank cleaning company has openings too. I will try them first. At least it's honest work.
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?