Mary Jo Foley is has a post up this morning about the Political Social Stream that Microsoft Live Labs are launching today.
Microsoft’s Live Labs — the Microsoft incubation lab that combines Microsoft researchers with MSN product managers — has launched a new technology preview, just in time for the U.S. presidential election.
Live Labs released on October 9 “Poltical Streams,” which the company is describing as a way for individuals to receive “at a glance, a more complete picture of the information and opinions on the Web on a single page.”
She also has an extract from an email set to her by the program management team that explains a little more about what they’re up to;
“Political Streams mines a stream of political content from both web sites and blogs in real time and then ranks that content, as topics, people and places mentioned rise and fall in popularity across the Internet. Headlines let you click down to an abstract of the story, along with graphs tracking the trends of people and places mentioned, as well as a link letting you click down to the full text of the story from there. This provides a broader context, allowing people to understand how the mainstream media and social media are discussing the issue, person or place.”
You can take a look at Political Streams for yourself here. It will only be live until the end of the US election.