SpinSpotter, a new browser plug-in, hopes to put a thorn in the media’s path of biasness, although it claims to have tremendous respect for journalists. SpinSpotter lets you browse news sites through its Spinoculars, is sure to start off by attracting a crowd of online news junkies.

SpinSpotter a San Diego-based service, with its lead investor: Epic Ventures, call themselves the truth mongers and destroyers of spin. It works as such that it looks for areas of news on the article, which appear to present editorial opinion as fact or other instances of “spin”, from a published list of rules of spin. Then it enables users to rate, edit, share spin or find instances itself has missed; as long as it doesn’t cross the published rules by spin. Thereby SpinSpotter learns from the input of its trusted users, enabling it to find more spin with technology.

It’s still in Beta, and if you go to its homepage, you’ll find written below the logo: ‘very beta’, quite humorous and yet defining that it needs news users to start off the service.

Users are required to install its plug-in, currently available to FireFox users, though an IE 7.0 plug-in is on the way. After the installation, while browsing news stories, you’re required to flag instances of media bias; keeping along the lines of its guidelines (as defined by an advisory board of professional journalists).

The guidelines prohibit: personal voice, passive voice, biased source, disregarded context, selective disclosure, lack of balance, and over and over reliance on press releases. There’s a slight upgrade; when you submit the spin in the news article, other SpinSpotter users will be seeing the text marked in red, with an explanation of the reason of it being tagged, who tagged it, and an edit option to correct the spin. It’s like a mixture of del.icio.us and factcheck.org.

A group of “refrees” will jump in a core group of users join up for the service. These will be journalism grad students, and will function in the same way an admin or moderator does to an online message board. Their main area of work will be to ensure text marked as spin is actually spin. In addition to these features, users can vote a marked passage. Hence, the SpinSpotter algorithms can determine which articles will possibly be declared biased through checking what users are agreeing is biased reporting.

CEO and co-founder John Atcheson states: “Bush’s third term”, a phrase that may likely get flagged repeatedly. SpinSpotter would then automatically check that the phrase is likely to be biased. There’s also a Trust rating for the users, allowing them to mark accurate instances of bias, after which other users will vote them and increase (or decrease, in the case of inaccurate marking) their Trust rating. Although for trusted users only, a down vote by a trusted user can counteract thousands of up votes from untrusted users.

SpinSpotter also aims to generate revenue through selling advertising on their site, and collecting & selling the back-end data their users will generate to ad agencies, marketing groups, political campaigns and even news outlets.

Below is the company’s video from DEMO:

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