TechFest 2008: BLEWS - What the Blogosphere Tells You About News

Posted By: Tina Wood | Mar 11th, 2008 @ 5:59 AM

What a great time for BLEWS...while blogging about politics is at an all-time high, BLEWS simplifies the debates for you...here's what I found out at TechFest 2008.

While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader without information about which stories figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres. It visualizes information about which stories are linked to from conservative and liberal blogs, and it indicates the level of emotional charge in the discussion of the news story or topic at hand in both political camps.

BLEWS also offers a “see the view from the other side” functionality, enabling a reader to compare different views on the same story from different sides of the political spectrum. BLEWS achieves this goal by digesting and analyzing a real-time feed of political-blog posts provided by the Live Labs Social Media platform, adding both link analysis and text analysis of the blog posts.