Political Streams: Microsoft Live Labs web site tracks political dialog

by Brad Linder Oct 10th 2008

Micorosft has launched a new web site that tracks popular political news stories and blog posts. Political Streams works a bit like a news aggregation service like Techmeme. But the layout is unique.

Items are listed either in the News or Blogs category based on the source. Scrolling over those colorful bars brings up the number of blogs or news sites writing about the main item. There's also information about related people and places. And if you click a headline you'll be taken to a sub-page with an excerpt from the article and links to related sources.

Each item also has a graph that shows how much "attention" a person or place has received in the last month. Political Streams draws its information from the links between blog post and news articles and from information found in Freebase, a community-driven information database.

It's not clear whether Political Streams uses a white list of selected blogs and news sites or if the headlines are drawn from Microsoft Live Search results. While I wouldn't recommend using Political Streams as your primary source of news just yet, the web service does offer a glimpse at some of the hot political topics in the US right now.

[via CNET]

Tags: microsoft-live-labs, political-streams, politics

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

wpdunn71901 said 8:27PM on 10-10-2008

Yaaaaaaaaaaaawn!
another left leaning/leftist hijacked website

the party of open mindedness my buttocks

Quikboy said 8:07AM on 10-12-2008

Awesome. I checked it out, and it is a pretty interesting aggregator. I really like how it points out the 4 major areas (news, blogs, people, and places) and shows the connection between them.

The design of the site itself, is a great piece of work, especially considering this is Microsoft (MSN sites anyone?). Also, the info. from Freebase is actually useful for a quick understanding, though the graphs could use some more details and the ability to be enlarged.

Overall, it's pretty good. I just wish there was a search box, could use just a tad bit more relevancy in the related items, and the AJAX could be smoother. Political Streams beats the heck out of the MSN Election site MS set-up. I wish more product teams at MS could have the sense, style, and coolness of the Live Labs teams.

Samuel said 7:10AM on 10-15-2008

Well, Microsoft had to bring out something competitive to the new MacBooks/Pros I suppose.

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