Spinspotter Puts Group-Edited Bias Markers On News Sites

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Spinspotter, a free toolbar plug-in for Firefox 3, gives anyone who sees opinions masquerading as objective reporting a kind of little red pen to note the spin with. After installing the toolbar, signing up and logging in, you’ll see red-highlighted lines and sections of stories that other readers saw a bias or other problem with. Luckily, when visiting lightning-rod sites like the New York Times or Fox News, you can turn the marker-viewing off. You can also mark your own passages and describe what you see on Spinspotter’s site. It’d be nice to be able to mark spin with a bookmarklet instead of having a toolbar constantly present—and it looks like that could be hacked up—but it’s an otherwise neat exercise in wiki-style peer review—keeping in mind, of course, that anything group-edited can produce unexpected results. Spinspotter is a free download, works wherever Firefox 3 does.