Spencer Critchley

The Web

Wonkosphere: Political Reputation – or at Least Buzz – Management

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It’s early days, but just like the record industry, American democracy is being taken apart and rebuilt by digital technology and the web.

Several trends are converging to make this possible and, I think, inevitable. All are characterized by the loss of centralized control to open and/or free systems. These include the rise of open political platforms, such as moveon.org, as an alternative to parties; and the disintermediation of news coverage via blogs, YouTube and citizen journalism. Lately I’ve been following the rise of a third trend: alternative ways of tracking candidates’ reputations. The latest example of that: Wonkosphere.

Wonkosphere graph of buzz about Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama and other candidates

Wonkosphere uses patented technology licensed from the University of Arizona to track how much buzz there is about candidates, as well as the tone of that buzz. It crawls hundreds of blogs every day. To measure buzz:

[Wonkosphere] measures the proportion of buzz for each candidate in all blogs for the 24 hours preceding the latest update. Percentages for each candidate are calculated every four hours. To get the value we first analyze each blog post for each candidate, and score the prominence of the candidate’s name within the post. We sum these prominence scores across all candidates then express their scores as a percent of the total.

As for tone:

Tone measures the amount of positive and negative language used in statements about the candidate in blog posts. On the home page and top of the candidate pages, we indicate whether the tone value is high, low, or average compared to the average range of tone values for all the candidates in the last 24 hours. These values are broken out for liberal and conservative blogs.

We also calculate an average tone value across all posts each candidate for each calendar day, broken out by political persuasion of the blogs mentioning the candidate.

Wonkosphere also plans to reintroduce its “Mud Meter”, which it used in 2004 to measure mud-slinging between George Bush and John Kerry.

As I mentioned, Wonkosphere’s tech is patented (and they even trademarked “Mud Meter”), but the content is free. I don’t see any mention of plans for an open API, but that would be welcome.

As with the Wikipedia trust-coloring system (which is not limited to politics and which I wrote about here) and the Truth-o-Meter (wrote about it here), data graphics are used to powerful effect: condensing storms of information so that meaning can be seen at a glance.

And come to think of it, free, powerful data graphics generation is another trend behind technology-enabled open democracy.

How It Works

“The core of our system is a network text analysis technology developed at Arizona State University called Centering Resonance Analysis (CRA), which is licensed to Crawdad Technologies. It applies natural language processing techniques to convert blog texts into networks, then analyzes these networks to determine the relative importance of all the words in the text. This allows us to judge how much any given post is about a particular candidate, and how positive or negative the writing is. Centering Resonance Analysis has been shown in research… to be more accurate than simple ‘word counting’ methods.”

More Political Reputation-Management: The Truth-o-Meter

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Truth-o-MeterFollowing my recent post about a color-coded reputation management system* for politicians (indicating their truthfulness by the color used to display their names on web pages), I came across Politifact and its Truth-o-Meter.

Politifact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly that will “analyze the [presidential] candidates’ speeches, TV ads and interviews and determine whether the claims are accurate.”

I found it via the techPresident blog, where Joshua Levy notes that the it could benefit by being opened up to users:

…and let them pore through the records and make the connections. As Jay Rosen’s recent overtures to crowdsourcing and the various projects of the Sunlight Foundation have shown us, the crowd is smarter than a few individuals; open up the process to them and you’ll be amazed at what they find.

And I’d like to see a system that follows you around (the way a reputation does in oral cultures), so there’s less cover provided by the fact that the ratings are tied to particular locations on the web, which most people probably wouldn’t end up visiting. A system that follows you around like, say, your name.

*Inspired in part by Luca de Alfaro’s Wikipedia trust-coloring project.

Proposal: A Politicians’ Reputation Management System

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News of computer scientist Luca de Alfaro’s Wikipedia trust-coloring system revived – and improved – an idea I’ve been playing with: automated reputation-management for politicians. The idea is to make the concept of honor meaningful again, by creating new social rewards and penalties for behavior that affects the rest of us. (It could, of course, also be applied to journalists, corporate leaders or other public figures.)

Chosen as a Top 10 blog post of the month by Carnival of Trust

De Alfaro’s system, now operating in demo form on a sample of a few hundred Wikipedia pages, ranks the trustworthiness of Wikipedia authors by measuring how long their contributions last without being edited. Text contributed by the author is color-coded for trustworthiness:

Text on white background is trusted text; text on orange background is untrusted text. Intermediate gradations of orange indicate intermediate trust values.

I think it would be useful to be able to do the same thing with politicians’ names every time they appear on the web. Here’s how I think it might be spec’d:

  • Our software would crawl the pages of factcheck.org, looking for the names of politicians.
  • The software would check to see if each name appeared in the context of a correction of an untruth/exaggeration/”misstatement”.
  • The reputation of each politician would be scored according to how many appearances his/her name made in such negative contexts.
  • Any time the politician’s name appeared on a web page, it would be displayed in a box of the appropriate color. In this case white might not be the best choice for “trustworthy”, since the politician might not be trustworthy, just unranked. So we might go spectrum-wise from green for “honest” to red for “frequent liar”. (On a relative scale – I’m not enough of a Puritan to believe there are people who are 100% honest or 100% dishonest.)
  • This color-coded display could be accomplished either on the client side or the server side: on the client side as a browser plug-in, or on the server side as an extension of the publisher’s content management system.

I think there would be a strong value proposition for both consumers and publishers. Imagine the impact of seeing your news presented this way:

In response to a question on why the US is in Iraq, Senator X said, “….”

vs.

In response to a question on why the US is in Iraq, Senator X said, “….”

And imagine the possible impact on politicians’ respect for the truth. Currently, if factcheck.org or some other organization calls you out on a fabrication, the impact is more or less safely sequestered within their limited reach. This way, the impact could spread everywhere, the way good or bad word on one’s reputation spreads through small real-world communities.

Why use factcheck.org as opposed to open ratings? If the reputation ranking were open, I think we could count on enormous amounts of abuse by partisans, including attempts to undermine all trust in the system. The people behind factcheck.org are journalism experts, and the site is avowedly non-partisan. But it might work to make the ranking system “porous” as opposed to fully open, like the new publish2 journalism community, or in fact like granddaddy slashdot. People who had themselves earned a reputation for honesty could be allowed to rank the honesty of others.

There would probably be claims, especially by those with names of an embarrassing color, that factcheck.org (or any other arbiter) is not in fact non-partisan. And so consumers might choose alternative arbiters, if it came to that. But here, too, some reputations would weigh more than others, as they always have.

Follow the Risk: Amateur Journalism & Democracy

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Adapted from a reply on John Jarvis’ Buzz Machine blog:

The Internet and cheap digital tools allow crowd-sourcing of news by amateurs, not just because the technology makes production and distribution fast, easy and cheap, but also because it diffuses risk through the crowd. So it makes any individual’s share of the risk small enough to be acceptable, and makes the small compensation (recognition, fun, etc) acceptable as well. In the same way, the net itself has been made available for next to nothing by diffusing the cost (risk) through countless servers and routers.

But in discussions of the amateur future of media there’s an issue of risk management that usually goes unexamined. Traditionally, risk has been contained by corporations (for profit or not), and individual reporters have been able to risk time, effort and potential liability because a corporation was both compensating them for and insuring them against risk.

The question for the future is how we make sure we still cover important stories if they require a lot of risk to be taken on by one or two individuals. The diffused risk model is fine – and may even be better in some ways – for reporting stories that can be reported from the outside, by amateur observers. For example: speeches, earthquakes, riots, terrorist attacks, etc.

But some of the most important stories will still require individuals to take on very large amounts of risk, including months or years of time and potentially huge liability. For example: financial crimes, political corruption or wars.

We might dismiss old ways of doing things, but we can’t just dismiss risk (I’ve noticed – and certainly been guilty of it myself – that when risk has been lost track of, hand-waving starts). In the new media world, some risks (such as printing costs) do disappear into the cloud. But only some.

Not all risks are financial. One possible outcome of the “amateurization” of news is that politically important stories stop being covered (and I’d say such a trend is already well under way, as the unit value of hard news coverage drops relative to to coverage of the nexus of sex, death, entertainment, shopping and celebrities. Not because only old-style experts can possibly report hard news, but because the risk isn’t being managed (including, I’d have to say, the risk involved in becoming an old-style expert).

This transition might lead to a financially optimal result. It might also amount to democratization in some ways, in that publishing is opened to all. But socially, the picture may not be all bright. It amounts to whether or not it matters if there remains a distinction between citizens and consumers.

I’m not saying “old ways good, new ways bad”. But neither am I saying “new ways good, old ways bad”. As is usually the case, I think the new reality is likely to be complicated. We’re going to have to find new ways to manage risks – like maintaining a healthy democracy – that will still be worth taking even after the old ways of handling those risks are gone. The “buggy whip maker” argument says that you shouldn’t try to force your fellows to pay you for economically unproductive activity, such as, by some lights, journalism. Again, not all risks are financial.

The News Business Is Broken in the Digital Age – If You’re an “ee”, Not If You’re an “er”

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Via Tim O’Reilly’s blog I come across San Francisco Chronicle publisher Phil Bronstein, predicting layoffs and saying the news business “is broken, and no one knows how to fix it… And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.”

Meanwhile, according to a Zogby Poll I find in the Financial Times, “Newspaper editors are overwhelmingly optimistic about their businesses, despite uncertainty about future business models, according to a new global poll of newsroom attitudes to the rapidly changing industry.”

Which is it? Both, I’d say – it depends on whether you’re an “er” or an “ee”.

As with other media businesses, digital technology is a big opportunity for employers, and a big threat for employees. Mostly because the former won’t be paying nearly as many of the latter.

Dave Winer, at his scripting.com) blog, has a provocative prediction of the future of a news business based on citizen journalism:

…journalism should become a required course, one or two semesters for every graduate. Why?… In the future, every educated person will be a journalist, as today we are all travel agents and stock brokers. The reporters have been acting as middlemen… As with all middlemen, something is lost in translation, an inefficiency is added.

You could say the same about music, film and any other business that can be disintermediated digitally.

Among the technorati, the default response to this process seems to be optimism. I can see why (and I share some of it): we’re experiencing a massive wave of democratization at the same time as a huge increase in productivity. Especially for the many geeks who have a libertarian streak, this goes straight to the sweet tooth. If you complain that the “inefficiencies” being eliminated are people, the quick response is the “buggywhip maker” argument: Why should we hold back progress and prosperity to protect outmoded jobs?

But it seems to me that democratization and gains in productivity, because they’re so dramatic, are blinding optimists to the effects of a third phenomenon: massive transfers of risk.

All businesses are essentially risk models: Managers devise ways to package risk in a way that they can sell for a profit. If I’m running a news business, my risk model used to be that I was taking a lot of upfront risk in paying reporters, editors and others to find and prepare the news, which I could resell to advertisers, subscribers and news stand customers. But if I can now get citizen journalists to contribute content for free, I’m transferring my upfront risk to them. My business’s risk model is now very different. I aggregate free content, use it as the seed of a community, and sell advertisers the community.

So what’s the problem? For one, the exploitation inherent in offloading risk onto a crowd of individuals, no one of whom is fully equipped to take it on, and few of whom are compensated for it. Photo journalist Sion Touhig wrote a powerful piece on the human costs in The Register a while back. Sample quote:

We’re continually being told the Internet empowers the individual. But speaking as an individual creative worker myself, I’d argue that all this Utopian revolution has achieved so far in my sector is to disempower individuals, strengthen the hand of multinational businesses, and decrease the pool of information available to audiences. All things that the technology utopians say they wanted to avoid.

And I think there’s a potential cost to all of us, regardless of whether our jobs are affected. That’s because the risk traditionally taken on by news organizations includes the potentially huge liability involved in performing an essential service to democracy: investigative reporting. By “investigative” I don’t mean gossip & gotchas or clip jobs, I mean developing sources, interviewing experts and poring through references, files and databases.

Citizen journalists can probably learn how to do this (and now that I think of it, that’s another reason for the geek appeal of disintermediation: the endless seductiveness of learning new stuff!). But how many actually will do it, or even should? As a citizen journalist, do you really want to take on a story on the scale of Iran-Contra, Enron or Plamegate? Can you muster the thousands of hours, and face the gigantic legal – or even physical – risks?

Certainly not as a lone citizen journalist. That risk that’s floating around loose still needs to be packaged in some way, or else it just floats off over the horizon. And then we don’t have investigative journalism any more. Some “ers” may welcome that, too. But I believe it’s a big problem for all of us, since we are all “ees” at one time or another. So if we’re going to open up journalism by sharing access to publication, I think we need to start looking for some new mechanism for sharing the risk.