Public Opinion Aggregation by Annotation and Tagging of Online News Stories

Ubiquitous access to internet has resulted in more and more people going online to get their daily dose of news. In a 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 41 % of the respondents said they get most of their news online, 10 % more than those who said they got most of their news from a newspaper. A lot of socio-technical factors have contributed to this phenomenal rise in adoption of online news in recent years. One of the biggest reasons why people are increasingly reading news online is because it facilitates discussion with peers (Nguyen 2010), offering different viewpoints which aid in forming a rounded personal opinion about the news story. The Pew survey found that 37 % of online news users (and 51 % of 18-29 year olds) think that commenting on news stories is an important feature to have. A lot of people tend to shape their opinion by reading discussion comments, reflective articles, blogs and even tweets about the news. Hence, an increasing number of people rely on online sources of news – be it news websites or news aggregator services like Digg, Reddit, Google Reader, Flipboard, Pulse etc. The problem with these news websites and aggregators is that the only way people can gather public opinion is by actively searching through the endless stream of comments and feeds, filtering ou