Crazy Idea #74 - PoliticalRank - a PageRank Clone

Loosely based on the idea of Google's PageRank (a measurement of a page's authority, based on the strength of incoming links), I think it would be interesting to have one or more measurements of PoliticalRank for web sites.

Unlike PageRank, which is more of a quantity measurement, PoliticalRank would be a quality one - evaluating the relative political position of a website on a basic left to right scale (where left wing pages would be quality, just kidding!).

You'd need to write a bot that would collect a massive database of webpages. Then you'd evaluate the relative politics of each website (and perhaps each page on each site) based on factors like keywords, the site that the page was on, incoming links, outgoing links, and ultimately on user site reviews.

Whereas PageRank can get away with just giving everyone one point for each webpage, PoliticalRank cannot start in the middle. It needs to start off with user ratings that would judge each page's (or site's) politics. You could also use either editor or user ratings of keywords to determine whether a site was left or right. For instance, a site that had lots of mentions of "social justice" would be leftwing. A site mentioning "revolution" or "socialism" would be further to the left.

Where it gets super-tricky, is you have to distinguish between positive and negative references. Here I think incoming and outgoing links will be critical. A right-wing website might make fun of liberals a lot (and thus have a high liberal keyword density), but they aren't going to have too many outgoing or incoming links from liberal sites.

Beyond a simple left-right spectrum, you could do two dimensions (economic equality on one side, social freedom on the other), or even more (add gender, race, environment, and other issues).

Ultimately you could produce a nifty toolbar (firefox extension anyone?)

This would make a fascinating research project. You could come up with statistics on whether conservative web sites were attracting more traffic, whether Google's PageRank was correlated with rightwing or leftwing sites (I'd expect rightwing sites since they have more money, but if they give a lot of weight, as part of a pro-educational/anti-commercial bias, to edus or orgs - leftwing sites could do pretty well), and more.

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Another crazy idea in a similar vein is a politics translator like Babelfish that would translate any site from liberal to conservative (or vice-versa). For instance, just replace 'Bush' with 'Clinton', 'conservative' with 'liberal', 'fight the terrorists' with 'peace' and you are well on your way!