Get your Internet Spinoculars here– see the spin in online news stories. This is the marketing spin for SpinSpotter, a new Firefox 3.0 add-on browser tool. The site garnered coverage by The New York Times, CNET, Business Week and others. News on news apparently travels fast.
Heck, if man or machine can help me distinguish facts from dog poop, I’m interested. I visited the Spinspotter website to see how their B.S. detector worked. It’s an election year and the tool would come in handy. (I couldn’t download it, since I don’t use Firefox 3.0.)
The Spin
Here’s what SpinSpotter says it does (from their website “What We Do” page):
* Create your own spin markers to alert others to spin you discover.
* See spin markers created by others, and by SpinSpotter’s user-fed algorithms.
* Share examples of egregious spin with your friends.
* Edit the spin to bring out the truth.
* Be alerted when the article you’re reading is really just a recycled press release.SpinSpotter does this by bringing together three key parts:
1. An advisory board of prominent journalists from across the political spectrum who set objective rules for what constitutes “spin”
2. A uniquely guided form of crowd-sourcing that operates strictly within the rules set by SpinSpotter’s Journalism Advisory Board
3. A computer algorithm that constantly learns from users’ input and leverages that knowledge across all news sites.
OK, let me see if I got this right—-you use human slant detectives to catch the spin, “prominent” journalist judges, some code of truthy objectivity and a computer algorithm to get ….
UN-Spun
Well, according to one professor, not much.
Mark Liberman, writing on Language Log, took the spin specs for a spin and was not impressed with the claims of the “very Beta” SpinSpotter.
Among his remarks:
In other words, Mr. Herman’s description [Todd Herman is founder of SpinSpotter] — and the company’s explanation on its web site of “what we do” — are prime examples of spin. In fact, I’d go a little further, and suggest that Mr. Herman’s description is beyond “spin”, edging into the territory of good old-fashioned “lies”….
This might be an unusual type of demoware, though, one that is released for general use in the hope that enough people will submit their proposed spin-spots to give the company enough free training data to actually develop some of the technology that they pretended to have in the first place…
My tentative conclusion: SpinSpotter is basically a scam, and the documentation is a prime example of spin, and Jon Fine at Business week got spun…
The best spin that I can put on this episode, from the company’s point of view, is that they hope to recruit users to do free data annotation for them, and they genuinely plan to use this annotation to create algorithms for automated spin detection. As Dan Tobias suggested, this would make it the first “software version of stone soup”. On this view, SpinSpotter is a sort of benign and well-meaning fraud, eventually to be redeemed by the wisdom of crowds.
(read the post to get the Mr. Liberman’s full spun account).
Ouch. That review stung harder than an D- in the Professor’s Introduction to Linguistics class.
After reading the flack from Jack Mark, SpinSpotter blog posted a ….
RE-Spin
… saying hey, maybe we made some communication mistakes, but heck Prof, give us a break, whydontcha. Can we appeal our grade? Some folks understood our user-generated story.
Read the blog post response in its entirety. Here are a few excerpts:
Our hope was that they could begin to populate the system with spin markers, and begin to feed the back-end algorithm so that it could start to find likely instances of spin even before we released the beta version of our software to the public. Unfortunately, this plan proved disappointing for two reasons. First, we overestimated the number of hours the students we enlisted would actually put in over the last few weeks of their summer vacations and first few weeks of classes. Consequently, the spin markers that actually appeared, being spread across a range of publications, were barely noticeable. Second, because of the limited number of spin markers being created, we were not able to generate the level of input necessary to make the back-end algorithm produce reliable, high-quality results…
We ultimately decided is was better to launch without algorithmically-generated spin markers than to launch with suspect algorithmically-generated spin markers, because we didn’t feel doing otherwise was fair to journalists, or to the reputation of our system…
I also know that in every interview I’ve personally been involved in I’ve bent over backwards to explain how the rule set is used to guide user input, and the user input is then used to feed the algorithms. As an example, you can read the article by Jake Swearingen of Venture Beat, who, interestingly enough, chose to include within his article the offending graphic I describe above, and he still got the story straight. I also feel confident that any reporter who stopped by our booth at the DEMOfall08 Conference pavilion – a group that included the venerable Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal – clearly understood that the system is fundamentally user-driven.
I say give the SpinSpotters an A for effort and ease up on the cam-say, aud-fray (words that have been known to cause shit to hit spinning fans). If it’s user generated, why hell, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist (or linguistics professor) to know it’s capable of being crappy. But, as you say, it’s benign– like bad art– it can’t harm you (unlike a bad doctor).
If nothing else, perhaps folks might become more conscious of language and its spinning properties. Heck, I say you could create an interesting linguistics course on language spin.
Gee, what ever happened to being betaproof?
[Note to Readers: This post contains misspellings and/or grammatical errors. They were intentionally inserted for entertainment purposes. How's that for spin?]
