Track that bias: New app visualizes cable news topics live

CNN spends a lot more time reporting about the Murdoch phone hacking scandal than News Corp.-owned Fox News.

Ever wanted to know how biased Fox News and CNN really are? A new OS X app called News Mapper helps you to find out by making the program of both cable news networks real-time searchable. Users can, for example, search for uses of politically charged vocabulary like Obamacare or mentions of embattled media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the app displays the frequency with which each word was mentioned in a graph that gets updated in real time as the news coverage continues.

Popular words used on Fox News.

Users can then click on the time line and browse small snippets of transcripts from each network, revealing the context in which a word was used. News Mapper even generates tag clouds for the most commonly mentioned words on CNN and Fox News. The app, which was recently launched as an experimental alpha by Bay Area-based Synchronize.tv, is a great toy for any news junkie but its also a good demonstration of the power of data for the future of TV.

Weve previously covered Synchronize.tvs attempt to kill the TV news ticker by offloading contextual information from the TV to the second screen. Essentially, it aims to empower third-party developers to build smarter second-screen apps by telling them what exactly is happening on the TV screen at any given moment. A first demo app for this enabled user! s of GetGlue to check in automatically into shows running on their TiVo. News Mapper takes this one step further, demonstrating what the startups context API is capable of. Not only does Synchronize.tv know which show you are watching, but it actually knows whats being talked about on that very show right then and there.

Thats a very compelling proposition. Second-screen apps could take this kind of information to serve up contextual information on your iPad, or even utilize it for Adsense-like advertising that is reflective of the content youre watching on TV at any given time. Synchronize.tv founder Erik Schwartz told me via email that his companys Context API is available in closed beta to developers starting this week, and that he is looking for adventurous developers that want to build second-screen apps based on this kind of data.

Synchronize.tv isnt the only company looking at utilizing this kind of data to turn TV programming itself into a platform to build applications on. The BBC recently launched the experimental semantic programming guide Chanelography, making it possible to search across close to 170,000 TV show episodes, movies and newscasts for mentions of people and places. Want to know how often Barack Obama was mentioned on the BBC since his election? Chanelography has the answer.

Chanelography focuses mostly on catalog content, whereas the News Mapper app puts an emphasis on things airing right now, but both approaches have one thing in common: They put an emphasis on data analysis. Americans watch close to five hours of TV every day. Making sense of all that data that is associated with that programming could open up a whole range of new possibilities for developers, regardless of whether their apps live on connected TVs, second screen devices or in the cloud.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Samsung asks ITC to ban the import of Apple devices

Image
The back-and-forth in the patent dispute between Samsung and Apple continues, with Samsung filing a request for a U.S. import ban against the iPhone, iPad and iPod, FOSS Patents reports . The complaint was filed with the International Trade Commission (ITC) on Tuesday. The ITC is a government regulatory body, which acts independently of the courts. Apple seems to be gearing up for a preliminaryinjunctionrequest in its legal case against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, but it hasnt sought any action from the ITC, unlike in previous cases against competing smartphone manufacturers such as HTC . Samsungs move is a clever way to beat Apple to a potentially hobbling import ban, since the ITCs decision is independent of the ongoing court case, and a final decision is reached within a fairly set time frame of 16 to 18 months, once the ITC agrees to investigate. Apple is likely to respond with a complaint of its own, according to FOSS Patents Floria...
Keep reading

China to make Tesla the next BMW

Image
Tesla's China business is booming Hong-Kong traded Tencent, a company best known for its WeChat messaging app, disclosed in a Tuesday filing that it's  taken a 5 percent stake in Tesla for $1.78 billion.  The investment follows Tencent's new stake in taxi-hailing app Didi Chuxing, which can be accessed through WeChat. "I think Tencent likely wanted exposure to a company that was growing very quickly in electric and autonomous" vehicles, said Tasha Keeney, an analyst on the  ARK Industrial Innovation ETF (ARKQ) , whose top holding is Tesla. "We think the autonomous mobility as a service market could be $10 trillion in gross sales globally by the early 2030s, and companies like Tesla or  Baidu  could take a cut of that," she said. Tesla declined to comment to CNBC. Tencent did not respond to emailed requests for comment. A Tencent spokesperson  told The Wall Street Journal  that "Tesla is a global pioneer at the forefront of new te...
Keep reading

Who Will Create iTunes for the Cloud?

Image
If youre like me, your digital media life is messy. If I were to take inventory of where all my digital media resides, the list would include Flickr, Facebook, iTunes, Android, Netflix, YouTube, Picasa, Flipshare, Amazon, Kindle, iBooks, Windows PC, Mac, iPad and so on. Like I said, a mess. And while Im an early adopter, Im probably not very different from tens of millions of consumers who face digital media anarchy every day across the various screens, accounts and software populating their life. Apple is the first company to even come close to helping us manage this chaos, with iTunes. After it was first introduced a decade ago, the service becamehugely popular partly because it was the first cohesive management tool for first music, then later other types of media. But iTunes has gotten flabby with age , and the creaking has gotten more noticeable lately as the cloud becomes more and more important for digital media storage. In a way, iTunes has become the Windows of consumer medi...
Keep reading