agon.i

Agon, Greek root of the word agony, means contest or fight. The ancient Greeks considered agon to be one of the fundamental building blocks of life. Agon could occur internally, such as fighting against your responsibilities by playing a game on your phone, or externally. The personification of contests such as the ancient Olympic games was called Agon. In more general terms agon represents a contest of wills, be it in debate, art or physical exertion.

With our app agon.i we hope to revive the spirit of Agon with regard to our consumption of news. We host and publish previews of news articles from around the world. Unlike other news aggregation services, we make no attempts to monitor you or discover what you want to see. We believe that such an approach creates an “echo chamber” environment (a metaphorical description of a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a defined system).

Instead agon.i draws content from GDELT updates (Global Database of Events Language and Tone), a dataset designed for scientific analysis of news published online. This data feed provides approximately 3000 articles every 15 minutes. We collect the feed and filter it to English articles we can cleanly parse for a title and photo, then submit each of them to IBM’s Watson for topic identification.

Along with each article agon.i presents the option to concur with the articles sentiment or to contest it, the only requirement being you either post your reasoning or agree with reasoning someone else has posted. Once you have staked out your position you are then able to discuss your position or that of others through threaded replies.

All of this communication is completely anonymous, you are assigned a persona when you make your first response on an article and it will remain with you throughout any interactions you have there.