If it was April 1st I'd know not to comment on SpinSpotter - but it seems to be a genuine story I found via ReadWriteWeb.

Apparently, we are suffering from a 'spin epidemic' and SpinSpotter, together with the efforts of the Truth Mongers and Spin Destroyers out there, will save us.

Not sure if SpinSpotter is directed against bad journalists, evil PRs, or their paymasters in politics and business, but I have a few doubts.

SpinSpotter is a downloadable plug-in for Firefox - with IE coming (interesting decision on prioritization: are Firefox users more likely to be active SpinSpotters?). Put simply, the plug-in, called Spinoculars (eeow), allows you to flag and annotate for the benefit of other Spinocular users where you detect or suspect spin to have infiltrated an internet article.

I'm all for using the tools of the internet to expose error or wrongdoing, but isn't SpinSpotter going to be a tool for those who invest too much of their lives adding trollish comments to stories? Surely SpinSpotter just offers another channel for their vitriol, conspiracy theories, bias and prejudices?

To mitigate this risk SpinSpotter applies a taxonomy for the type of spin detected. For example, Over Reliance on Press Releases is one of seven types of spin offences. All of which gives the activity a, teacher marking your homework, feel to it.

I have my doubts. Personally I think the principle of caveat emptor is a more scalable tool to fix this problem.

Tags: SpinSpotter, journalism, PR, Spin

PS - thinking on a bit, if the mission of SpinSpotter could be subverted to simply highlight bad writing style on the web, that'd be a killer application. I am just off to register ProlixSpotter.com...