Hear me on NPR's "On the Media"

A couple of weeks ago I did a segment for NPR's On The Media talking about Dispute Finder. You can listen to it here:

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/07/31/02

On the Media is a really great radio show about what is going on in the media. Definitely worth being a regular listener :-)

Updates to the web site

Hi Guys,

We just deployed a new version of the web site.

This version includes a lot of the changes that have been requested by users, and also fills in some features that probably should have been in the previous version.

Notable features include:

• We've rejigged the look a bit. In particular, the tabs and search should be easier now and snippets look a bit prettier.
• You can now more easily unmark snippets other people have marked. The intention is that this be used if you see that someone is spamming the system. This is combined with a background moderation system that lets us see when users are disagreeing over whether something is making a disputed claim.
• You can /finally/ delete a claim that you created in error
• This version includes an initial version of a machine learning algorithm that learns how to find snippets on the web that make a disputed claim, based on your examples. You may notice a robot face and a percentage next to some snippets in the snippet search interface - this tells you how confident the learning algorithm is that the snippet is making the claim.

There is also an accompanying new version of the Firefox addon. This will be available as soon as it gets through the mozilla review process. The main new feature with this update is that the addon now highlights only the text that makes a disputed claim, rather than highlighting entire paragraphs.

As always with a new version, it is likely that we have introduced some bugs. Please let us know if you find any by either commenting on this blog post, or clicking the "send us your feedback" link in the Dispute Finder web site.