Do you ever wonder how a blog you’re unfamiliar with is biased? For the visually-inclined among us:
While most political blogs are extremely partisan, their biases aren’t immediately obvious to outsiders like me. I wanted to see, at a glance, how conservative or liberal the blogs were without clicking through to every article.
With the help of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases.
Memeorandum, of course, is the political blogger mecca, where stories percolate in and out (and up and down), depending upon whether bloggers reacted to them. (At least, I think that’s how they’re doing that…)
Since I have Firefox and Greasemonkey, I installed their script…. and discovered that The Moderate Voice, where I frequently blog, shows up as Dark Blue.
Interesting.
Unfortunately, although Polimom Says is included in the dataset, I’m not linked on memeorandum today (or lately at all, for that matter) — so I haven’t a clue what color I’d be. It’d be great if somebody could look at the data and tell me, but I don’t think Purple is an option…