In the Now Herding Cats Department… while I find it amusing that there are people out there who feel media+The Internets are somehow, someway at all “manageable,” I like, and thus will evangelize, about two new tools that help control spin and lies and gross fabrications in media. Both tools are seeking crowd-sourced, computated journalism goals.
One is being hatched here in Atlanta out of Georgia Tech and is designed to flesh-out what we see/hear online via video. That’s Videolyzer. The other is SpinSpotter.com, spawned from the brains of a liberal and a conservative working together. (And they say it can’t be done. Hmph.)
From the NYTimes on SpinSpotter.com:
Any attempt to judge news articles could rely on experts, a broad audience of readers or a set of formulas. SpinSpotter combines all three, but for now the formulas are still being adjusted, the audience is not yet big enough, and it remains to be seen how unbiased or effective the experts are. SpinSpotter grew out of a longstanding obsession of Todd Herman, a conservative former talk-radio host who is the company’s chief product officer. “I thought of this 10 years ago,” he said. “The things I’d see in mainstream media drove me crazy.”
The chief executive officer, John Atcheson, is politically liberal, and he and Mr. Herman say they tend to balance each other out. “We don’t delude ourselves into thinking we’re going to eliminate spin, and that’s not even our objective,” said Mr. Atcheson, who has been an executive of several technology companies. “We just want it to be transparent, above the surface.”
Read full article about SpinSpotter.com here. Videolyzer is here.
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