Angry in the Great White North

Skewz.com lets readers of political news in either the traditional or new media submit stories they think would be interesting to other readers.  But the clever twist at Skewz is not voting on whether a submitted story is interesting or not.  The clever trick is that you vote on just how skewed to the right or to the left a story is. 

What does this mean?  Unlike Digg, a lot of votes in one direction or another doesn't relegate the story to the memory hole.  On Digg, the voting scheme would lead to concerted efforts on Digg to bury stories of one political sort or another.  On Skewz, an extreme skewing in one direction or the other might limit readership, since these stories might be of interest to smaller segments of the site's readership than more centrist stories.

But then again, maybe not, since political motivated readers are less likely to be so centrist.  But the point is that the voting is not about whether you should read the story, just about what point-of-view the story has.

As votes accumulate, a source of stories, whether it is the online presence of a traditional media source, or new media source like a blog, can be classified as either a right-wing source or a left-wing source.  There is even a "media bias cloud" the visually places the sources on the left or the right.

I think it's a neat idea, and I've added a "Skew" button to each post.

One warning though.  This is an American site.  That means the color-coding (or colour-coding) is different.  Blue means liberal, and red means conservative.  It takes some getting used to.