Daytime Running Lights
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter released a cool little Firefox user-script today that tells you, for a big bunch of political blogs, which way they lean (left or right) by coloring the link backgrounds red or blue, respectively. See the official release, and find out more about how they used Singular Value Decomposition, web spiders, and cleverness to make this data available, at Andy’s blog
Seeing that the plugin only worked in Firefox, and being the great fan of bookmarklets that I am, I’ve cloned the data into a bookmarklet. To see it in effect in non-Firefox browsers, drag this link to your bookmarks toolbar: Political Colors
Now visit Memeorandum – when you get there, click your new bookmarklet, and you should see something like this:
Not only did I make this work in Safari, but another slight modification I made, allows it to provide meaningful colors on many other sites. Here’s our good friend Google News, showing its political colors:
The colors will show on any links to sites in Joshua and Andy’s dataset. Have fun!
1 comment on A political thermometer
Excellent!