What a mind bomb!

This new, undocumented usability feature for Radio's news aggregator flags bullshit posts. You may have to download the newest version of Radio to get it.

I saw it in Dave Winer's Going Twitchy With Macros. At first I thought it just blocked posts from John Dvorak. But, per Lipton, it turns out to have more features.

First, it adds a bs attribute to your posts. While the default value is false, permissable values include true, unknown, and fractional numbers between 0 (false) and 1 (true). Given some of the blogs I read, maybe the default should be true? Optional params: type of bull, degree of bull.

As we move into weblog journalism, this becomes part of full disclosure.

If you dive down into the RSS specs there is a bs tag that was never used. Now we know what it's for: So you can filter hogwash in or out based on the presence, type, and degree of blatfarb.

Second, upon news aggregation, the bsDetect macro:

• Computes a bsRating if not provided by the author. I assume it's algorhythm is symetrical with respect to the dec
   
• Rates posts with their bs score. 
   
• Adds offenders to a list. Their posts don't show up until they all below your Blatfarb Tolerance threshhold, set in Prefs. You can manually remove sources from the list and adjust your tolerance to manage how many feeds you get. 
   
• You can share the list in opml.

There is room to build on this.

• Daypop or Weblogs.com could find the feeds and posts with the highest and lowest scores.
• Automatic deletion threshhold. Too deep and I never see the post. I want to see how well the bsDetect scorer works before implementing this.
• Collaborative filtering. Add features to the Radio Community Server so that shared feed ratings can be averaged within a given community.
• Trending. Show how a feed, and my portfolio of feeds, is trending in terms of quality.