Sidecar ) Unpartisan
UPDATE: Well, Unpartisan was a great little experiment in political news aggregation for a while, but ultimately it became a bit of a burden to support.
In May 2009 I took the site down. I doubt Unpartisan's 6 faithful readers will miss it much.
— Cameron
What is Unpartisan?
The Basics
Unpartisan.com is a political news aggregator created by Pelago employee Cameron Brooks in 2005 that blends news, discussion, and commentary from all over the political blogosphere. There are thousands of political weblogs all over the internet comprising two distinct political spheres. Unfortunately, it is extremely rare that these spheres ever intersect or even meet. Cameron set out with the goal of not necessarily getting everyone together at the table to discuss their differences and reach a compromise, but to at least offer a forum where each side can at least see what the other has to say.
How it Started
“The state of political discourse on the web has for some time been in quite a sorrowful state. On one side you have the liberal bloggers, on the other side conservative bloggers; and though there are a few moderate voices out there, it's rare that the two sides ever intersect except to engage in a yelling match. As a student majoring in political science at UCSB, I was saddened by the rancor produced by these two groups. Unpartisan began as a project to not only hone my programming talents, but also as a means to attempt to bridge the divide between the Left and the Right of the Internet. Only by first understanding the other side can one begin to find common ground.”
— Cameron Brooks
The Technology Behind Unpartisan
No Human Editors
Unpartisan.com relies entirely on RSS feeds to select stories, scanning thousands of blog postings and news stories from hundreds of individual RSS feeds. Stories are aggregated and the most popular political stories are chosen from those feeds. Unpartisan uses no human editors, and every story, every blog posting, is chosen by a complex computer algorithm which groups RSS entries according to similarity. The software uses custom-built text-comparison technology to categorize and rank stores by similar topics, and ranks stories according to popularity (the more people that are discussing a story, the more popular it is).
The Unpartisan Platform
The site is built entirely in PHP with a MySQL backend. Unpartisan has a custom user authentication and login system and custom comments software. The front end is entirely XHTML-Strict tableless CSS-based design.