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]