The latest attempt to cash in on an arbitrary Web 2.0 widget has finally arrived, meaning everyone can stop freaking out about Scrabulous' departure from Facebook. Lest you considered Drudge Report or Media Matters objective journalism, SpinSpotter is a new toolbar application for Firefox that alerts users whenever they stumble upon an article containing bias. Watch out, Atlantic magazine!It's awesome that there now exists a way to objectively define the criteria that makes up slanted journalism. Political coverage problem solved.
No:
"The service will rely heavily on the input of its users, and, in a manner
familiar to denizens of participatory Web projects (à la Wikipedia), the
contributions of those whose annotations are consistently trusted by the
SpinSpotter crowd will carry more weight…users will be rated (through the
software and feedback of other users) on their skill in correctly applying the
spin rules.
So the amount of bias a site contains will be decided not so much by the "spin algorithms(!)," but by the perspectives of the application's most vigilant users? Though the algorithms are based on the Society of Professional Journalism's code of ethics, that users get to vote on where bias appears works in direct odds to the "science of media" theory behind SpinSpotter।
Here's why: There no safeguard on SpinSpotter for the Asperger-levels of vigilantism that Internet politics arouse in people. So a website's particular spin rating will most likely be decided on by the same people who commented 40 times on the Andrew Breitbart item in the Observer।
So browse easier, with a perfect tool to calculate the amount of anal-retentive types that spent their free time combing through the New York Times, looking for corrections.
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