Memeorandum Colors: geeking out a way to show blog bias

In this brave new world of political blogs, it's a given that they have a slant--but it's not always clear what that slant is, at least when clicking on a link. Couldn't there be some way of figuring that out? OK, figuring it out in a way that isn't overwhelmingly time-consuming? Couldn't it be done algorithmically?

Waxy.org hacker-journalist Andy Baio and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter decided that the answer to those questions was yes and went on to create Memorandum Colors, a Firefox plugin that works with the political aggregation site Memorandum to display the political leanings of the sites it links to. And they make it look so easy:

If that's not enough for you, how about their ultra-detailed tech explanation:

Armed with the spreadsheet of over 50,000 blogger-to-article relationships, we needed to somehow find correlations in the data. We used a method called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), a method to break down complex data in matrices to its component parts.

If that made sense beyond a conceptual level, then keep reading the rest of their deep background--it devolves into matrixy goodness quickly.

The script itself is cool, and I'd love to know if it could be ported over to something like Google News or even Drudge (be interesting to see if his links were ever blue). But as a proof-of-concept, it's brilliant and as the understanding of how to manipulate data points spreads to journalists, it's exciting to see what they come up with.

That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger

The New York Times plays the nattering-old-man card today with a guffaw-inducing story "exposing" the darker side of blogging: In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

It is, of course, a ridiculous premise: that blogging creates an environment so competitive for a scoop that bloggers are dropping like flies from the stress of it all.

It's ridiculous because you need to consider the source: One of the leading news organizations in the world. Are the editors and the writers of the New York Times punch out calmly at 5:00, ready to head home and take it easy? Of course not. News is a stressful business. The pressures of deadlines and the competition that results from the need to get the story right and get the story fast are enormous. They are not a new phenomenon. And job stress certainly isn't unique to blogging. But the Times sure isn't going to tell you that. Instead, they're going to offer a much more newsprint-friendly story:

Drop a blog, save a life.

Marc Andreesen of Netscape and Ning fame offers up a few new hot scoops for the Times:

Future New York Times headline submissions from yours truly:

Blogging Causes Herpes

Bloggers Shorter than Normal People

Want To Contract Malaria? Try Blogging

Bloggers Have Bad Breath

Leprosy and Blogging May Be Connected

Hitler Probably Blogged

Now Bloggers Aren't Even Wearing Pajamas

Blogging Fad Almost Over

Cuban to newspapers: cut out the blogging

Zilliionare Mark Cuban (he of "The Benefactor" TV show fame... or not so much) has some very good observations about newspapers adopting blogging on their websites--namely, they shouldn't.

Or, more accurately, they shouldn't call it blogging. Which seems like splitting hairs, but he puts it pretty plainly and makes a good point in the process:

Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business.

There's a world of difference between the New York Times' blog The Caucus and the millionth political blog out there, so why should they be labeled the same thing. Ultimately, with so many different uses for a blog engine, "blogging" is a term that's rapidly losing its meaning--I always saw it as a stopgap term to help people that didn't see it for what it was: publishing.
Cuban again:

Do everything possible to brand the product or service in a manner that segregates it from the masses. Perception is reality. If you can leverage your existing brand to create the perception that yours is different from the masses in some meaningful way, then you must do everything you can to do so.
...
When readers actually read the [NY TImes] blog, they will see that its of a higher quality than say, Blogmaverick.com. It may well be that some do. The marketing reality however is that there is a significant risk that they will not. That rather than assigning the brand equity of the NY Times to the blogs hosted, they will take the alternative path of assigning their perception of what a blog is to the NY Times, there by having a negative impact on the brand equity of the NY Times. That's an enormous risk for any mainstream brand to take.

Yowza is right. He goes on to suggest a simple fix for the problem, rebranding it "real time reporting," and emphasizing the expertise behind the writing.

Not a half-bad plan. Which is why no newspaper will ever implement it, to afraid that people "won't think we're blogging."

sometimes, local still truly does matter

In the shadow of Super Tuesday, it seems that the national media outlets have decided that coverage of the February 9th primaries aren't worth major attention. 

When The Bigs move away from a story is when you can truly see that local news does still matter--like the Omaha World Herald's coverage of today's caucuses which paints a picture of chaos and confusion that the national media isn't picking up on at all.

Kiss the strength of the shield

Congress is currently kicking the tires on a shield law for journalists that offers a level of protection from prosecution at a federal level--something that's been absent until now. That it's going to be dead in the water due to a promised Bush veto makes a lot of the arguments for and against it moot (two second summation: it started decent and got watered down), but in the process of crafting the law, congress is defining what it means to be a journalist, a pracice that seems both feudal and incredibly dangerous. Why? Well let's take a look:

COVERED PERSON -- The term "covered person" means a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public...

OK, so far so good. They've got the bases covered more or less, and it's nice to see publishers in there too. But...

...for a substantial portion of the person's livelihood...

yikes

...or for substantial financial gain

Double yikes.

Tying journalism with the pay a person may get from their work seems like a tin-eared way of defining journalism at any level, let alone at the level of a federal shield law. Of course it's defined to cut out as many bloggers as possible, but the definition currently put forth also automatically cuts out protection of first-person narratives from whistleblowers, soldiers in the field, and other ground-level, primary-source (thus naturally amateur) material. And that's just skimming the surface! It cuts out most community newspapers and indie pubs who don't pay worth shit, any kind of volunteer-run publication, even freelancers who work other jobs (even if that other job is teaching about journalism). In other words, it cuts out many of the folks that help to create everything we know as journalism on a daily basis and it sets a legal precedent that could cause trouble for years to come.