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gvidas · 10-01-2010, 05:32 PM

UT, have you ever read Earth, by David Brin? He discusses this -- the rise of enough diverse sources of news and opinion (and tools to sort them) that people's opinions/beliefs/politics become fragmentary and irreconcilable. Among a lot of other things.

I wonder if there's a way to address this algorithmically (is there a google news API?) -- to build an aggregator that observes your reading preferences and highlights opposing viewpoints. You could use the fact that all news sources are biased, and rely on that, rather than having to do any textual analysis. There's some risk of falling into the Crossfire trap ("a hack from the left and a hack from the right"), but..

I'm imagining something where, as your news-reading reflects a position on that 2-axis political spectrum plot, you're also given news and opinion from sources whose own position on the spectrum is at least some distance away, and ideally from a different or opposite quadrant.

10-01-2010, 05:32 PM	#18
gvidas Hoodoo Guru Join Date: Jul 2009 Posts: 286	UT, have you ever read Earth, by David Brin? He discusses this -- the rise of enough diverse sources of news and opinion (and tools to sort them) that people's opinions/beliefs/politics become fragmentary and irreconcilable. Among a lot of other things. I wonder if there's a way to address this algorithmically (is there a google news API?) -- to build an aggregator that observes your reading preferences and highlights opposing viewpoints. You could use the fact that all news sources are biased, and rely on that, rather than having to do any textual analysis. There's some risk of falling into the Crossfire trap ("a hack from the left and a hack from the right"), but.. I'm imagining something where, as your news-reading reflects a position on that 2-axis political spectrum plot, you're also given news and opinion from sources whose own position on the spectrum is at least some distance away, and ideally from a different or opposite quadrant.