Skewz: Not Telling You Anything You Didn’t Already Know

Skewz is the latest entry in the political news aggregation space, a sector that is getting way too crowded, even for a U.S. election year.

Skewz is designed to be Digg with a political slant; users can submit stories, and then others can vote on the purported political slew, using the U.S.-centric blue (for very liberal) to red (for very conservative) scale. Based on the ratings for articles, you can also see how a media outlet skews overall.

As Anthony Ha at Venture Beat points out, Microsoft is also working on a similar project called Blews, which uses trackbacks from known liberal and conservative blogs to determine bias of other blog articles, and aggregates the articles according to the "level of emotional charge" in the articles. According to the diagram on the Blews project page, information is gathered through blogs, Twitter, and Usenet (are people still using Usenet?)

Are we now oversaturated with aggregation apps? The appearance of both of these apps tells me yes. The audience for political news and information online has grown; The Pew Research Center reports that nearly 1/4 of all Americans (24%) regularly seek information about the American Presidential campaign online, up from 13% four years ago. It makes sense that a company would want to build an app to take advantage of that audience.

Are we really supposed to believe, however, that an audience, especially a young one that's grown up online (Pew's numbers show that 42% of those 18 to 29 in the above number are going online for political information) doesn't know that Drudge Report skews conservative while HuffPo skews liberal?

Skewz also has some bugs to work out; when I revisited the site again this morning, the first article listed on the liberal side had lines of Javascript in place of an article snippet. It also was skewed fairly moderate by site users, but no moderate category exists. It may capture more of the audience curious about reading views from the "other side" by launching before Blews, but I'm not sure there's an audience who'll need to come back again and again.

Skewz screenshot: 

Blews screenshot: