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updated viz of political blogs’ link similarity

I’ve been meaning to post a simple update to my previous visualization of political blogs’ link similarities. In the previous post, I used GEM for layout, which was not, in hindsight, the best choice.
In the visualization in this post, the edges between blogs (the nodes, colorized as liberal, independent, and conservative) are weighted as the [...]

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Sidelines at ICWSM

Last week I presented our first Sidelines paper (with Daniel Zhou and Paul Resnick) at ICWSM in San Jose. Slides (hosted on slideshare) are embedded below, or you can watch a video of most of the talk on VideoLectures.
Opinion and topic diversity in the output sets can provide individual and societal benefits. If news aggregators [...]

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visualizing political blogs’ linking

There are a number of visualizations of political bloggers’ linking behavior, notably Adamic and Glance’s 2005 work that found political bloggers of one bias tend to link to others of the same bias. Also check out Linkfluence’s Presidential Watch 08 map, which indicates similar behavior.
These visualizations are based on graphs of when one blog [...]

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bias mining in political bloggers’ link patterns

I was pretty excited by the work that Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter did to identify and show the political leanings in the link behavior of blogs that are monitored by Memeorandum. They used singular value decomposition [1] on an adjacency matrix between sources and items based on link data from 360 snapshots of Memeorandum’s [...]

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US political news and opinion aggregation

Working with Paul Resnick and Xiaodan Zhou, I’ve started a project to build political news aggregators that better reflect diversity and represent their users, even when there is an unknown political bias in the inputs. We’ll have more on this to say later, but for now we’re making available a Google gadget based on a [...]

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RedBlue

A note came across the anthrodesign list earlier this week about redblueus.org, a website on which people who disagree about a certain issue are paired up, given some guidelines for productive conversation, and then have a facilitated discussion in reaction to a provided scenario.
One of my concerns about virtual community and online discourse has been [...]

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California sues automakers

While reading the news the other day, I noticed that California’s attorney general, Bill Lockyer, filed suit against six automakers. Interesting. Lockyer is “demanding that they pay for environmental damage caused by the emissions of their vehicles.”
Interesting, but irrational (as far as I can tell).
To the best of my knowledge, the automakers have remained in [...]

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