Category — Politics

I’m no politico, but, with the presidential nominee race in full swing, politics has been on my mind more than usual. My morning info-breakfast of FOX news in my hotel room in Jacksonville this week seems particularly rife with snipes at the current “front-runner” Hillary Clinton. Given that FOX news is constantly attacked for its right-wing “tilt”, I’ve been taking daily ganders into the political realm of the blogosphere to see how (if at all) the most popular political blogs have been spinning this week’s news, if for no other reason than to achieve balance in my info-diet. I was particularly surprised (and fascinated) to find yesterday that some blogging technologies being used by popular blogs and media sites (like the New York Times and GigaOm) can influence the “spin” of the related content of system generated out-bound links automatically based on programmed “left” or “right” preferences. Simply stated, this means that many blog readers are being funneled to left or right leaning sites, completely unknowingly, through auto-generated related content links. Here’s a little view into how programming bias into related content links is accomplished on the back end of a blog using a popular technology provided by a new start-up called Sphere.

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