This PoliTech post was meant to be an introduction for politicos to Spotplex.com, a new Digg competitor that ranks news and blog posts according to the number of times they have been clicked on versus a Digg/Bury system that liberals have used to game Digg and ban conservatives. I will still link to spotplex, it has great potential but, it’s entire political section is currently useless because it is dominated by “gay news daily”.
Spotplex.com monitors the popularity of each post and blog by how many times it has been viewed through an image installed on the blog. Bloggers can request to participate on the site. This is great because it is not susceptible to any group intentionally “burying” a story so it gets less exposure. However, Spotplex has fallen prey to another problem, they have allowed blogs to pick their own categories without moderating them.
The political category of Spotplex.com now is completely dominated by a gay news site because, per the system, it gets the most hits. However, many of their posts are about things like the current top hit, “Ace Young Flexing More Than His Musical Chops” and other things completely unrelated to politics but nonetheless highly ranked on the page because the gay news site, as a whole, is more popular than some of the blogs that belong in the category. This makes the page relatively useless for those looking for political news. Here is what I sent to Spotplex service:
Hello-
Just wondering how “gay news daily” is political. It seems like it might be a better fit for the culture category.
Also, your spotplex code only shows the image, I linked the image back to your homepage. Hopefully this will help you grow and gain traffic/blogs.Thanks,
Brandon
This may be fixed in the future but, they have no intention to properly moderate categories now per this response from their customer service:
Brandon,
We appreciate it a lot. We should have put a link to image. Thanks for the tip.
By the way, which category a blog should belong to is something we can not decide by ourselves. We just let bloggers who write articles make that decision. Don’t ask me if I’m happy with their decision in this case, though.
If you have any question or suggestion, feel free to contact us.
Sincerely,
Spotplex Customer Support Team
support@spotplex.com
Before liberals, gay rights activists, etc get all worked up, I am only pointing this out because it is a weakness in their system. People looking for political news do not want to just read “gay news daily”, that is more appropriately placed in a culture or gay news category, not in the Politics category.
As someone who is interested in political coverage through the latest web 2.0 mediums, I have an interest in pointing out weaknesses in an otherwise strong and useful system. I hope the Spotplex is able to intervene with some degree of moderation merely to increase the functionality it’s site. I look forward to using it in the future.
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Well booo hooo for you. Poor baby, why don’t you go ask your mommy to kiss you and make it all better for you.
Don’t like the fact that liberals and gay rights activists are making gains in society and the political world? That’s just too bad because people are waking up to Christohet Supremacist trash like you and are beginning to see that we were right all along and that the crooked Rethugnicans and their braindead followers are quickly on the way out and soon will be swept into the dustbin of history.
Soon everyone will see that “Republican” is just another term for corrupt, evil, anti-American, immoral, stone-hearted, murderous warmongers and hypocrites who create wars using an endless stream of lies and then engage in handing out no-bid contracts to their friends, war profiteering for the small but sick and demented cadre of fools in power, and then while raiding the treasury and keeping the southern border wide-open for millions upon millions more illegal immigrants to come in and steal the country away from us, you drive the country into total bankruptcy, sell us out to China and send millions of jobs overseas. Then in the midst of the administration’s endless list of high crimes, have the gall to repeatedly turn around and say they need hundreds of billions of dollars over and over again to fund their sick, evil, war in foreign countries which has the effect of turning the entire world against us. Oh, and then there are the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed too… but people like you don’t care at all about them because they’re just “brown people” and “towel heads” and they’re inhuman and since they’re not white like us, they’re just basically cockroaches and don’t matter at all.
It’s no wonder Al Qaeda wants to see America destroyed now… it’s because of the Repugnicans, the Bush family, and people like you. And it’s no wonder too why the majority of Americans now want to see the Repugnican/capitalist/Reagan-era model of government defenstrated and shatter into a million unrecognizable pieces, never to be resurrected anywhere again. And as for all those in power who helped the U.S. reach such its lowest point in history and become the most hated and untrusted country on the planet, they all belong in prison. But not in any prison. No no no… They belong in Gitmo, and they deserve to have all the same techniques of torture that they authorized (in violation of the Geneva Conventions) to be used on them, over and over and over again.
America used to stand for good, honor, integrity, justice, fairness and equality. Thanks to people like you, we not only don’t stand for any of that anymore, we have have become the opposite of all those things, and become the most hated country on the planet too.
When the Muslims want to take revenge on what we have done to them, we will blame people like you for the revenge they take out on America.
Yes, scum like you are what is going to be responsible for the downfall of this country. Maybe one day you can wipe the blood of so many dead American soldiers off of your wicked little hands… dead, American soldiers whose lives were completely wasted and who died in vain in pursuit of an official policy of proven lies — the same hands that help the Bushitler regime steal two elections and seize power in a coup d’etat — and ponder for a while about how the collective evil of you Repugnicans has been responsible for so much death, destruction, illergal wars, carnage, slaughter, butchery, heartache, criminality, debauchery, abominable lies, ruined lives and families, hypocrisy, sickening immorality, ruthless inhumanity, inequality, and just plain ‘ol unrestrained Mephistophelian evil.
“and then while raiding the treasury and keeping the southern border wide-open for millions upon millions more illegal immigrants to come in and steal the country away from us”
Umm are you serious?
[...] out this hateful monologue from one of our less than considerate readers named “Republicans Are Sick People and Need Psychiatric Help“: Yes, scum like you are what is going to be responsible for the downfall of this country. [...]
wow. just wow. Brandon I think we know who egged our house last year…
…”you drive the country into total bankruptcy, sell us out to China and send millions of jobs overseas. “…..
Fact Check: The budget defecit is shrinking. A Trade Deficit=Capital Surplus. Unemployment is at some of its lowest numbers ever.
— the same hands that help the Bushitler regime steal two elections and seize power in a coup d’etat —
Is there any “real” basis to claim 2004 was stolen?
…And as for all those in power who helped the U.S. reach such its lowest point in history and become the most hated and untrusted country on the planet, they all belong in prison. But not in any prison. No no no… They belong in Gitmo….
What is the constitutional basis for this? You do know what the constitution is, right?
….Don’t like the fact that liberals and gay rights activists are making gains in society and the political world?….
Umm…he specifically said that was not the point of the post.
…..but people like you don’t care at all about them because they’re just “brown people†and “towel heads†and they’re inhuman and since they’re not white like us.”……
Please cite one example of this ever being articulated on this blog or any other sensible blog/website/political speech.
……”Well booo hooo for you. Poor baby, why don’t you go ask your mommy to kiss you and make it all better for you.”…
Brandon’s mom could kick your ass.
and they say we are full of hate…
SpotPlex is in very early beta and as such has limited result to a very limited number of sources (though you can sign up for notification when the service goes live). For tech testing puposes, it doesn’t really matter what the content is. Keep an eye on this site, as it’s a very interesting, Alexa-kinda-thingy-like twist in popularity ranking
Saying that “gay news” isn’t political is like saying that “black news” in the 1960′s wasn’t political. I agree that it is not the entire sum and total of political news, obviously, but it is indeed a subset of political news.