By Ross316 on

A brand new drpal-based site is launching today... www.SpinSpy.com

At SpinSpy you can submit stories, or bookmarks, much like digg.com but you can also rate how much "Spin" or bias you feel a news story has. Each time you submit a story it goes into a "pool" of other stories and by users ranking or voting on your story it could move to the front page.

Visit it to see for yourself. Right now it's still in beta and being used just by a few friends, but they say they are ready to see if there is a need for such a site.

Let me know what you think of the idea...

Comments

mrlatito’s picture

mrlatito commented

Greetings Ross316...

I looked at your site today and thought the voting/raking system is very cool. I like how it displays the graphic for each story showing if it "spins" to the right or the left. I am new to drupal so please let me know...is this a module or feature I can add to my site or is it custom built? If it is custom...I am very impressed.

I am trying to start a site for my community to discuss local issues and this ranking system would be ideal. I also like the large graphic that shows how many votes each story has received. In fact, the overall theme was bright and eye-catching.

Great site!

Ross316’s picture

Ross316 commented

Thanks. The voting/ranking system is a modified version of "nodevote". You can find it under downloads. That graphic showing the number of votes took a little while. I've finally got it set up to detect if you've voted and display a little checkmark etc... I'm still getting use to coding the "drupal" way.

I've also just integrated the "aggregator2" module, heavily modified, to suck in news stories instead of users having to supply them all.

Good luck with your site!

Zethris1’s picture

Zethris1 commented

Might you consider actually making a module of your own with this? I really like where you are going with it and I would love to contribute if you can actually post a release. nodevote is ok, at best, but Ilike what you have done with it.

Ross316’s picture

Ross316 commented

Which part would you want to contribute on?

As far as making a module of it I wouldn't know where to even begin. I have modified so many different areas by now I don't know what's original and what I did. Also only half of the mods I've made are in "drupal code" or using the api's the rest are just php hacks.

If you still want to see what all I've done let me know.

selbedo’s picture

selbedo commented

Ross,
Excellent job on SpinSpy... I am currently working on a site built around the Aggregator2 module and could certainly use your knowledge & experience. Please e-mail me at selbedo [at] gmail dot com...

Thanks in advance

Marco Palmero’s picture

Marco Palmero commented

Nice concept - I think its pretty original - Haven't seen anything like it...

Just wondering - will you be sticking with the table format or are you be planning a change to CSS tabless design in the future?

Good Luck!

____________________________________________________________________________
Blog | Sydney News | Photography | Travel |Best Designed Drupal Websites

ddonat’s picture

ddonat commented

I like this a lot.

it's a nice spin (If I can use that word) on citizen journalism. Rather than report the news, which many of do not have the time to do. We can report on the story's bias which is easier.

Do you really need to rely on submissions? Why not aggregate news stories and let people rate them. And why not track the average spin of the media sources.
Is there really a media bias to the left?
Is Fox really so right and CBS so Left?

This could be a valuable site. good luck.

ddonat’s picture

ddonat commented

It seems like a significan barrier to me for people to use your service.

I understand that without registering you could spoof the rating, but there are other ways around that.

People are being asked to register to too many sites these days, and I fear you are going to see this as a significant barrier to your site's adoption. I would recommend opening up the rating to all users.

Oh, and disregard my last comment about the aggregators I found them on your site.

Ross316’s picture

Ross316 commented

Everything you've suggested is already on the site. There is even a stats page (very early version) that tries to show the general trends of the site.

The only thing I might add is for people to add news feeds to their own profile for a personal view of the site. I'm also going to add some ajax for voting/ranking etc...

ddonat’s picture

ddonat commented

Sorry, if it is obvious: i've been known to miss a number of very obvious things from time time, but I can't see how I can rate a story if I am a guest. Not registered.

pembeci’s picture

pembeci commented

This is a very original and useful idea. I share the feelings above about allowing unregistered users to vote.

The graph showing the left/right bias at first confused me a little. I'd prefer a graph something like this:

- A Bar from -100 to 100 where -100 to 0 background is light blue and 0 to 100 is light red.
- After a story's spin is ranked it shows the spin value on that bar as either dark blue (left) between -100 and 0 or dark red (right) between 0 and 100 depending on the spin factor.

This will make it easier visually to compare spin factors of stories. For instance:

lllllllllllllLLLLLLrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
llllllllllllllllllllllllllRRRRRRRRRRrrrr
llllllllllllllllllllllllllRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

You can easily say the first story is biased to left, the others to the right, and last one is biased less than the other two while the second one is the most biased one.

I don't know why but this kind of a graph makes more sense to me and I found it more visually attractive. Of course, -100 is for illustration of the idea, I don't expect the numbers to be shown. I think, this kind of graph will also help evaulating the bias points of different news sources (that stats is also a great idea).

Ross316’s picture

Ross316 commented

There are 2 problems with this...

1. I'd have to add a field in the nodevote table to record the anonymous user's IP address or something. Right now nodevote just looks to see if the users->uid (0 for anonymous) = nodevote->uid. So when just 1 anonymous person votes no other anonymous users could vote on that story because they share the same users->uid, "0".
- Now that I think about it IP addresses would not be good because of people with dynamic IP's.

2. I'm not sure how anonymous users would affect the "Community Stats". I would have to separate them from the registered users data in order to keep things accurate.

I'll keep looking into it, but it seems like one big headache.

kae’s picture

kae commented

i'm trying to find the best voting module.
i linked to you at
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/node/43

kozuch82’s picture

kozuch82 commented

It seems like Drupal is catching up in theming! ;)

Jan

--
StandyWorld.org - Don't let M$ bastard the standards!

drupaltest@groups.drupal.org’s picture

drupaltest@groups.drupal.org commented

hi
it's good to see the solution.

shall i know where is voting/ranking in download?
actually u hv mention abut it tht it is in the download so help is good