Programming Bias Into Related Content Links: Are Political Blogs Guiding Out-Bound Traffic to the Right Or Left?

I’m no politico, but, with the presidential nominee race in full swing, politics has been on my mind more than usual. My morning info-breakfast of FOX news in my hotel room in Jacksonville this week seems particularly rife with snipes at the current “front-runner” Hillary Clinton. Given that FOX news is constantly attacked for its right-wing “tilt”, I’ve been taking daily ganders into the political realm of the blogosphere to see how (if at all) the most popular political blogs have been spinning this week’s news, if for no other reason than to achieve balance in my info-diet. I was particularly surprised (and fascinated) to find yesterday that some blogging technologies being used by popular blogs and media sites (like the New York Times and GigaOm) can influence the “spin” of the related content of system generated out-bound links automatically based on programmed “left” or “right” preferences. Simply stated, this means that many blog readers are being funneled to left or right leaning sites, completely unknowingly, through auto-generated related content links. Here’s a little view into how programming bias into related content links is accomplished on the back end of a blog using a popular technology provided by a new start-up called Sphere.

ABOUT SPHERE RELATED CONTENT :

Sphere is a startup that provides cool new tools for connecting mainstream and conversational media content. Think AdaptiveBlue for political and news blog content. So far, Sphere is best known for their Sphere Related Content Plugin but they’ve got a lot of other interesting blogging tools in the pipeline as well. The Sphere Related Content Plugin connects with an icon link at the end of blog posts. When a reader clicks on the icon link, Sphere finds blog and media articles related to the current blog post. It is currently used on popular blogs and media sites like the New York Times and GigaOm. The plugin is used mostly by heavy political and news related blogs, as it works best on topics that are being actively discussed in the blogosphere and news media.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF TRAFFIC SHAPING THROUGH SETTING PREFERENCES FOR AUTO-GENERATED RELATED CONTENT LINKS:

The cool thing about the Sphere Related Content Plugin is that, by creating connections between contextually relevant mainstream media and blog content, blog readers are exposed to a broader set of Internet and blog content. Furthermore, bloggers that install the plugin get to be content-link heroes, so to speak, by doing very little. What readers may not know, however, is that the blogger may set “left” or “right” preferences for all the links that Sphere provides. Giving bloggers the power to direct traffic to the left or right is a fascinating twist to traffic shaping – it means that, for really popular blogs (+10,000 RSS readers) , a lot of traffic can be directed to blogs that more closely agree with the opinions of the blogger. Consider that for a second…

Not only is a blogger able to provide links to articles and posts discussing the same or related topics, but they can actually influence the likelihood that the linked content will tend to agree with their political views.

When the traffic numbers are huge on a socio-politically biased blog this becomes an important insight – the ability to chose what related content a reader sees will naturally tend to reinforce the opinions of the blogger by directing traffic to the content of like-minded bloggers. This begs the question “What will happen as bloggers get more and more control over what they deem relevant for their out-going traffic?”. Who knows, but one thing’s for sure – this is a technology to keep on your watch list.

That said, I enjoy beta testing new technologies so I installed the Sphere plugin yesterday on this blog to see how it worked from the back end. Although you wont find any political posts on this blog, for those of you wondering, I left the Sphere related content preferences set to “neutral”, which is the default. Here’s a screenshot of the settings in the wordpress admin panel (to the right) so you can see the spin configuration. Feel free to comment and let me know if you think that the related content feature adds value. I’m always interested to know what my readers think.