techPresident - crowdsourcing - Comments

have the voices just shifted?

dmonasg — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:36:35 -0400

These are interesting and compelling observations. To zero in on a couple of details... if people are actually consuming substantial portions of things like Obama's speech on race, then it's a great improvement over the dominance of sound bites. But is there evidence that people are actually consuming more information? Or just getting it from a different source? It's also a positive development if people are exposing themselves to different opinions, so that things like Swiftboat lies are exposed. Similarly, though, is there evidence that people are actually reading blogs that they don't already agree with? In other words, is the internet providing more information so that people can make more informed decisions? Or is it simply reinforcing opinions that people already have, with greater speed and efficiency?

I confess I don't have a particular hunch one way or the other. I'd like to believe the supercharged access to information is a good thing for informed political decision making. I'm sure some PhD candidates are working hard on collecting data to figure it out.

Dan Goodman
monazzji.blogspot.com

How to make the "truth meter" follow the politician around

Spencer Critchley — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 03:07:19 -0400

Great idea, but 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.

I recently wrote on O'Reilly ONLamp about an idea to color-code politicians' names, potentially anywhere they appeared, based on truthfulness (as determined by searching factcheck.org):

It's based partly on University of California Santa Cruz researcher Luca De Alfaro's Wikipedia trust-coloring project.

PolitiFact

mattwaite — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:22:35 -0400

Thanks for writing about PolitiFact. We're really excited about the possibilities and are proud of the site. Just to clarify something: I designed and built the site's architecture, but I'm not running it. The hard work is being headed up by Bill Adair, the St. Petersburg Times' Washington Bureau Chief, who deserves all the credit for the original idea. Where we've put our resources -- into researching and reporting out the statements -- is where we have resources. The Times and Congressional Quarterly have some of the best reporters and researchers around (you can see the whole staff here). PolitiFact takes those resources and puts them to work in a form and format that I think works on the web far better than, as you wrote, reposting print material. Where we're thin on resources is on the administrative end, with the people needed to make participation work. Fact checking politicians and writing about it is an old newspaper story -- we know how to do that. But doing it this way is all new to us. Stay tuned. We've got more to come.

Matt Waite
St. Petersburg Times
PolitiFact.com | mattwaite.com